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Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1774, in the tiny village of Steventon, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, served as the town rector. Her mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was the daughter of a rector herself, and Jane was the seventh of eight children. She had an older brother, George, who suffered from epilepsy and did not live with the family. Wealthy, childless relatives who were very involved with the boy throughout his childhood adopted the Austen s third son, Edward.
The remaining six children, however, lived with their parents in the plain, comfortable village rector. Jane s closest relationship within her family was to her adored older sister, Cassandra. Three years apart in age and the only girls among the eight children, the two were close friends from childhood onward. Cassandra was once engaged to a young man who died of yellow fever. Similarly, Jane was very involved with a clergyman who died before they could become engaged. Neither of the sisters ever married, and the two lived together with their mother until Jane s death in 1817.
In 1801, George Austen, Jane s father, retired as rector of Steventon and moved with his wife and two daughters to Bath, where he died in 1805. The family s years in the city were difficult ones. In addition to Mr. Austen s death, Mrs.
Austen suffered a serious illness. Following her husband s recent death, Mrs. Austen moved with her daughters to Southampton. In 1809, Jane s brother Edward, who had inherited the estates of the wealthy relatives who had adopted him years before, offered his mother and sisters a permanent residence at one of his properties, a house in the town of Chawton. It was there that Jane Austen would live until her death, from what is believed to have been Addison s disease, at the age of forty-one.
George Austen, Jane s father, was a scholarly man, and the household included a large library, from which Jane read extensively throughout her life. Much of the children s education took place under their father s tutelage, with two of Jane s brothers, James and Henry, both of whom attended the University of Oxford, assisting their father with the younger children s periods of schooling at home. Jane and her sister Cassandra received several years of formal education, first at private schools in Oxford and Southampton and later at the Abbey School in Reading. Jane had a love for reading, and began writing at the age of twelve.
The Austen's were a lively, close-knit family. Literature was a shared family interest, and evenings in the rectory were often spent discussing works by the leading novelists of the day. Among Jane s favorite authors were Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Fanny Burney, and references to their work appear in both her letters and her own novels. Amateur theatricals were also a much-loved family pastime, and friends and neighbors were frequently recruited to participate in plays staged in the rectory barn.
This interest, too, later found its way into Austen s work, most notably in Mansfield Park. Indeed, family life itself is a frequent theme in Austen s work, and her heroines relationships with parents and siblings are as fully developed as the romantic alliances on which their stories turn. Many of Austen s wittiest, most informal and therefore most revealing letters were written to her sister, Cassandra, during their occasional separations, and it was Cassandra who most often had early glimpses of Jane s novels in progress. A less fortuitous result of the sisters close bond, however, was Cassandra s decision following Jane s death to edit or destroy any of her sister s letters and papers that she feared might cast Jane in an unfavorable light. For Austen scholars, Cassandra s loyalty has been a source of much speculation and regret. Now termed the Juvenilia by Austen scholars, three volumes of her early writings, dated between 1787 and 1793, remain in existence.
Her first mature work, an epistolary novel titled Lady Susan, was written in 1794 or 1795. Around that same time, she also began work on a second novel of letters, Elinore and Marianne (completed between 1795 and 1797), which she would rewrite two years later as Sense and Sensibility. Between the two versions, Austen wrote a third epistolary novel, First Impressions, which would later become Pride and Prejudice. In 1798 or 1799, following the initial rewriting of Elinore and Marianne, Austen began work on Susan, which would later be retitled and published as Northanger Abbey, her satire on gothic novels.
Because of the frequent lapses in time between each novel s earliest drafts, completion, and eventual publication, the publication dates of Austen s work are no indication of when the books were actually written. In 1803, two years after the move to Bath, Susan was sold to the publishers Crosby and Company for ten pounds. The book was never published, however, and was bought back for the same amount by Austen six years later. Austen also began The Watsons in 1803, a novel she put aside and never resumed after her father s death two years later.
In the difficult years following Mr. Austen s death, Jane appears to have abandoned her writing entirely, resuming it only after the family was at last settled at Chawton in 1809, where she embarked on a period of tremendous productivity. The years between 1809 and 1811 Austen devoted to Sense and Sensibility, and in 1811 the book became her first published work. That same year, she began work on Mansfield Park, which continued throughout the next two years. The following year, 1812, Austen began extensive revisions on First Impressions, abandoning its epistolary form for that of a traditional novel. The book was published in 1813 as Pride and Prejudice.
Mansfield Park appeared the following year, shortly after Austen began work on Emma, which was published in 1815. Over the next two years, Austen wrote Persuasion and began work on Sandition, which remained unfinished at the time of her death on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, England. Both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818. Jane Austen was one of the greatest of women authors. Yet so great is her talent and her insight into the complexities of human nature that the seeming simplicity of her books belies the universality of their perceptions. In turning her writer s gaze on the world around her, Austen reveals deeper truths that apply to the world at large.
Her portraits of social interaction, while specific to a particular and very carefully delineated place and time, are nevertheless the result of timeless human characteristics. If one looks beneath the details of social manners and mores that abound in Austen s novels, what emerges is their author s clear-eyed grasp of the intricacies of human behavior. What is also readily apparent is that human behavior was a source of great amusement to Austen. Her novels are gentle satires, written with delicate irony and incisive wit. The famous opening lines of Pride and Prejudice capture her style at its best: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Courtship and marriage are the subject of all six of Austen s novels, and she treats the topic with a skillful balance of humor and seriousness.
The elaborate social ritual of courtship and the amount of time and energy expended on it by the parties involved provide Austen with an ideal target for her satirical portraits. Dances, carriage rides, and country walks are the settings for the romances that unfold in her books, and the individual s infinite capacity for misconceptions and self-delusions provide the books dramatic structure. Her heroes and heroines misjudge each other, misunderstand each other, and mistake charm for substance and reserve for lack of feeling with a determination that seems likely to undermine their chances for happiness until at last they find their way through the emotional mazes they have built for themselves and emerge with the proper mate. Yet while Austen is happy to amuse her readers with her characters foibles and missteps, she brings an underlying empathy to her creations as well. Her heroines are never figures of fun that role is left to the stories supporting characters but are instead intelligent, sensitive, amiable young women who are eminently likable despite the flaws they may exhibit. It is human nature in all its complexity that fascinates Austen, and she is capable of providing her novels with interesting, well-developed central characters who are believable precisely because they are flawed.
Her amusement is not scorn but rather a tolerant awareness of the qualities, both good and bad, that constitute the human character. It is this awareness that lends Austen s work its relevance and contributes to her stature in the hierarchy of English literature. Austen sketches her character and relates their stories with the elegance and wit that are the unmistakable hallmarks of her style. Jane Austen s work offers ample proof that, in the hands of a gifted writer, stories of ordinary lives filled with everyday events can transcend their outward simplicity and capture the intricacies of human nature. Austen s ironic portraits of the world she knew are both a revealing look at her own time and a perceptive examination of the workings of the human heart and mind. 31 e
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