Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English writer known primarily for [|her six novels], which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment on the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century.
Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are implicit critiques of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of social commentary, realism, wit, and irony have earned her acclaim amongst critics and scholars.
Austen wrote major novels before the age of 22, but she was not published until she was 35. The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were moderate successes, but they did not bring her public fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1817—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but it was left unfinished on her death. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons.
Since her death Austen's novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series. They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869 her nephew published A Memoir of Jane Austen. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have been adapted in numerous films, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Emma, and an adaptation of Lady Susan, Love & Friendship, as well as the film Persuasion and the miniseries Pride and Prejudice, both released in 1995 by the BBC.
Biographical sources
The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her surviving letters and a number of sketches her family members and contemporaries wrote about her.Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen would have written in the course of her lifetime have survived and been published. It is believed that Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, by burning or otherwise. One theory is that she wanted to ensure that the "younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members." In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra, it is surmised, may have omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. It is certainly the case that important details about her life and the actions of the Austen family were deliberately omitted, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to have him raised away from its home, as was common for the time, or of wealthy Aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot, who was arrested, tried, and acquitted on charges of grand larceny.
The first Austen biography was her brother Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 "Biographical Notice". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, apparently published against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters.
Austen's family and relatives built a legend of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life. Critics have long taken issue with this depiction of a "mild" Austen. Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family."
Early years to age 20
Family
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire. Her father, George Austen, wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother, Cassandra, "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago." He added that the newborn infant was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion." The winter of 1775-1776 was particularly harsh, and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church and christened Jane.File:Chawton Church, Steventon, Hampshire.jpg|thumb|upright=1.20|Church of St Nicholas in Steventon, as depicted in A Memoir of Jane Austen
George served as the rector of the Anglican parishes of Steventon and Deane. The Reverend Austen came from an old and wealthy family of wool merchants. As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children and had to be taken in by relatives. In 1745, at the age of fifteen, George's sister Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. At the age of sixteen, George entered St John's College, Oxford, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh. She came from the prominent Leigh family. Her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.
George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were engaged, probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures. He received the living of the Steventon parish from Thomas Knight, the wealthy husband of his second cousin. They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by licence, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death.
After the living at the nearby Deane rectory had been purchased for George by his wealthy uncle Francis Austen, the Austens took up temporary residence there, until Steventon rectory, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.
Steventon
In 1768 the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He had seizures and may have been deaf and mute. At this time she chose to send him to be fostered. In 1773 Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.According to the biographer Park Honan, the Austen home had an "open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere", in which the ideas of those with whom members of the Austen family might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.
The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. The elder Cassandra spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter, and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."
Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents upon her return, "... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it." Le Faye writes that "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."
From 1773 until 1796 George supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. He had an annual income of £200 from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000. He also rented the 200-acre Cheesedown farm from his benefactor Thomas Knight, which could make a profit of £300 a year.
During this period of her life, Jane attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".