Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born into a money-strapped but intellectual family in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, England. She was the seventh of eight children and had only one sister, Cassandra, who was three years older than Jane. To supplement his income as a clergyman, Austen’s father farmed the land around his home and educated young boys who boarded in the rectory. Austen’s family home was a jovial place, with plays often performed in the barn, and aunts and cousins frequently coming to visit. The family’s richer relatives wrote and visited often, conveying the news and fashions from Paris and London to the rural vicarage. Austen began to write as a teen, reading her works of fiction aloud to her family. Austen never married, but she was proposed to once by a well-off, but personally unattractive man. She accepted his proposal, then called the marriage off the next morning. Austen visited Bath several times in the late 1790s, then moved there with her parents in 1801. It was during these years that she wrote Northanger Abbey. After her father’s death, she and her mother had little money and moved around for several years, before settling in Chawton. All through the first decade of the 19th century, Austen worked on her novels. Four works were published in her lifetime and two (including Northanger Abbey) were published after her death from kidney disease at the age of 41.