Jane Austen

George Austen (1731–1805), 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.

At the age of sixteen, George entered St John's College, Oxford, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827).

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.

In 1745, at the age of fifteen, George Austen's sister Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden.

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 license, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died.

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British 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.

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775 in a harsh winter.

Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "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 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.

The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), were a modest success but brought her little 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 died before its completion.

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.

The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 "Biographical Notice".

It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members.

A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series (illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering and sold as a set).

They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership.

In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience.

Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies.

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.

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".

Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship.

The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her.

Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published.

Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them.

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 omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury.

Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny.

Her works are an implicit critique 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 deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.