Jane Austen

Option 1

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled. Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.[6] Her works, though usually popular, were first published anonymously and brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.

Option 2

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon rectory in Hampshire, England. Her father, Reverend George Austen (1731-1805) was the rector at Steventon, and had married Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739-1827), a daughter of a patrician family, in 1764. Austen was the youngest daughter of the large, closely-knit family, with six brothers and one sister. She was particularly close to her sister, Cassandra, and her brother, Henry, who later became his sister’s literary agent.

When Austen was eight years old, she and Cassandra were sent to Oxford and then Southhampton to be educated. After an outbreak of typhus at the school, during which Jane nearly died, both girls returned home to continue their education. From 1785 to 1786, Austen and her sister attended the Reading Ladies Boarding School, where they studied French, spelling, needlework, music, and dancing. Forced to return home for economic reasons, Austen nevertheless continued to develop her literary mind under the guidance of her father, who maintained a large library and indulged his daughters with materials for writing and drawing.

Beginning in her teen years, Austen wrote poems, stories, and comic pieces for the amusement of her family. She compiled several of the pieces written between 1787 and 1793 into three bound notebooks, which are now referred to as Austen’s “Juvenalia.” Austen was also exposed to drama and comedy; the family's younger children often staged theatrical productions at home. As she continued her experiments in writing, Austen became adept at parodying the sentimental and Gothic style of eighteenth-century novels. Among her early works, one finds a comic novel with a deliberately misspelled title, “Love and Freindship”; a satirical “History of England”; and the epistolary work, “Lady Susan.” During this time, Austen also began to sketch out ideas for the novel that would later become Sense and Sensibility.

In 1795, while still living

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