Jane Austen

Jane Austen's Backstory

Early life at Steventon

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at the rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh child of George and Cassandra Austen.¹ Her father was the rector of the parish.²¹ She was taught mostly at home, using her father’s library and learning alongside the boys he took in as pupils, and her closest companion throughout her life was her sister Cassandra, almost three years older.¹ Two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, became Royal Navy officers; Henry was a clergyman, militia officer and banker; and Edward was adopted by the wealthy Knight family, whose name he took.¹

First novels

As a child she wrote comic stories for her family, the pieces now called the Juvenilia, which the family kept and which were published long after her death.¹ In her early twenties she wrote the first versions of the novels that became Sense and Sensibility (then “Elinor and Marianne”) and Pride and Prejudice (then “First Impressions”).¹ Her father offered “First Impressions” to a publisher in 1797, who declined it by return of post.¹ She also wrote “Susan,” the novel later published as Northanger Abbey, and sold it in 1803 for £10; it was not published, and Henry bought it back for the same sum in 1816.¹

Bath and Southampton

In 1801 her father retired and the family moved to Bath, where Austen began The Watsons, a novel she never finished.¹ On December 2, 1802, while visiting friends at Manydown Park, she accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, then changed her mind overnight and refused him the next morning.¹⁰ After her father’s death she moved with her mother and Cassandra to Southampton in 1806, sharing a house with Francis’s family.¹

Chawton and publication

In 1809 Edward gave the three women a cottage in Chawton, near his Hampshire estate, the start of what the Jane Austen Society of North America calls her most productive period.¹ Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, credited only to “a Lady,” followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815; each title page referred to her earlier books but none carried her name.¹ Emma was published by John Murray on commission, with Austen paying for printing and advertising, and its first printing of 2,000 copies was her largest.²

In the autumn of 1815 the Prince Regent, an admirer of her novels, learned who she was; she was invited to tour his London residence, Carlton House, and his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, wrote that she was “at liberty to dedicate any future work” to the prince.² Emma, which went on sale on December 23, 1815, is the only one of her novels with a dedication.² Walter Scott reviewed it favorably, without his name, in the Quarterly Review.²

Illness and death

She began Persuasion in 1815 and finished it in 1816, as her health was failing.¹ Early in 1817 she started the novel later called Sanditon, but by March she was too ill to continue; in May she moved to College Street, Winchester, to be near her doctor.¹ She died there on July 18, 1817, aged 41, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral under a gravestone that does not mention her writing.¹ The cause of her death is not known: Addison’s disease, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, lupus and arsenic poisoning have all been proposed, and her sister destroyed part of her letters.⁹

After her death

Henry and Cassandra arranged with John Murray to publish Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together; the four-volume set appeared on December 20, 1817, with a “Biographical Notice of the Author” by Henry that named her, for the first time in print, as the author of the earlier novels.³ Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, and its second edition, in 1871, printed Lady Susan and The Watsons for the first time.⁴ Sanditon was first issued by R. W. Chapman for the Clarendon Press in 1925.⁵

In 2017, the 200th anniversary of her death, the Bank of England issued a £10 note featuring her.¹¹ The 250th anniversary of her birth in 2025 was marked by festivals, balls and events in Britain and the United States; the Jane Austen Festival in Bath sold 15,000 tickets that year, according to CBS News.¹²¹³