Jane Austen

About this figure

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman, George Austen, and his wife Cassandra. She spent nearly all her life within a small circle of family and rural neighbors in Hampshire, later Bath, and finally the village of Chawton, and that narrow social world became the exact material of her six novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and the two published after her death, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817-1818). All six first appeared without her name on the title page - credited only to "A Lady" or "the Author of Sense and Sensibility" - and her authorship became widely known only after her brother Henry acknowledged it publicly following her death.

Much of what is known of her day-to-day life comes from her own letters, chiefly the long, quick, often very funny correspondence she kept up with her older sister Cassandra whenever the two were apart. A great deal of that correspondence does not survive; Cassandra is generally understood to have destroyed many of Jane's letters, which makes the ones that were preserved and eventually published more valuable than their subject matter might suggest. In a letter from Steventon dated January 16, 1796, twenty-year-old Jane teases her sister about a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy, writing that she means to "confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care sixpence," and reporting a few days later, with mock heartbreak, that "the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy." Biographers still debate how serious the attachment actually was. Austen never married, though in December 1802 she accepted a proposal from a family friend, Harris Bigg-Wither, and withdrew her acceptance the following morning.

She wrote steadily but published late. Early versions of what became Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice date from the 1790s, but nothing reached print until 1811, well after the family had left Steventon for Bath following her father's retirement, and then, in 1809, settled into a cottage at Chawton provided by her brother Edward, who had been adopted as a young man by wealthy childless relations and taken their name and estate. The Chawton years were the settled, productive ones in which all six of her finished novels appeared, in draft or in the final form later readers came to know.

Austen fell ill, by most accounts gradually, over roughly the last year of her life, and moved to Winchester in 1817 to be near her physician. What killed her is still debated: the long-standing diagnosis is Addison's disease, based on a retrospective study of her symptoms published in 1964, though other researchers have argued the evidence fits a lymphoma better. She died in Winchester on July 18, 1817, at the age of forty-one, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Cassandra's own account of her sister's final hours survives among the family letters: she describes sitting beside Jane for the last six hours of her life, supporting her head on a pillow in her lap, and closing her sister's eyes herself once she was gone - a plain, private record, written for a niece rather than for posterity, of a death that occurred well before the wider public had any idea who had written the novels signed only "A Lady."

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.