Biography of Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon rectory in Hampshire, England. She was the youngest daughter of the parish's rector. She had six brothers, James, George, Edward, Henry Thomas, Francis William, Charles John, and one sister, Cassandra Elizabeth. Her father, Reverend George Austen (1731-1805), was from Kent and attended the Tunbridge School before studying at Oxford. Thereafter, he became rector at Steventon and married Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739-1827), a daughter of a patrician family. The Austen family resided at Steventon until 1801, when Reverend Austen announced his retirement from the ministry and moved the family to Bath. Upon her father's death in 1805, Jane Austen moved with Cassandra and her mother to live with her brother Francis. In 1809, they moved to a cottage at Chawton, where her wealthy brother Edward had an estate.

Like most women of the era, Austen did not have access to much formal education. Her father, however, had a particular interest in education – even for his daughters. Consequently, Austen was first educated at home and continued her studies with a relative in Oxford in 1783. She also attended the Reading Ladies Boarding School in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire for a year (1785-1786). After returning home, Austen continued her education through reading, under the encouraging auspices of her father and brothers. Through the volumes in her father's library, Austen exposed herself to a wide variety of ideas and works.

From her teen years forth, Austen wrote poems, stories, and comic pieces for the amusement of her family. It appears that the younger children of the Austen family staged theatrical productions frequently at home – perhaps similar to those described in Mansfield Park. 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, now called the Juvenilia, one finds a satirical novel with a deliberately misspelled title, Love and Freindship. It appears that Austen began work on what would later become Sense and Sensibility in the late 1790s. In 1798, she began Northanger Abbey, a satire of Ann Radcliffe's famous Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho.

The happy continuity of Austen’s family life was disturbed by a series of departures. Her brother James left home in 1779 to attend St. John’s College at Oxford. During these years, her other brother Edward became very close to a wealthy and childless couple named the Knights, who may have provided the model for Mr. and Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey. Edward was later adopted by this couple. Jane left home to attend a boarding school called Mrs. Cawley’s in 1782, where she was joined by her sister Cassandra. They later transferred to the Abbey School in Reading after recovering from a bout of typhoid fever.

In contrast to the stories told in the Gothic novels that she parodied, Austen led a quiet and uneventful life. After the family moved to Bath, in 1802, she received her only marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither. Bigg-Wither was the younger brother of family friends and an Oxford graduate six years her junior. Although he was apparently unremarkable both physically and intellectually, his considerable fortune made him an attractive bachelor. Austen accepted initially, but changed her mind the following day and rescinded her promise.

In her era, unmarried women were not highly regarded. Women of high social rank were not permitted to work and thus remained dependent upon their families for financial support. For Austen, turning down the marriage proposal was an important decision, since marriage would have freed her from the embarrassing situation of being a "dependent." The marriage would also have provided a home for Cassandra – and could perhaps have helped her brothers secure better careers. As it turns out, Frank and Charles went to sea and eventually became respected admirals. Reflecting such a turn of events, many of Austen's novels contain admirable characters who find success at sea. One thinks, for example, of Fanny Price's brother William in Mansfield Park, or Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion.

Austen wrote throughout her life, continuing her work even after an onset of illness in early 1816. Most biographer's believe that she suffered from Addison's disease in her later years. She died in Winchester on July 8, 1817 and was buried at the city's famous cathedral. In total, Jane Austen published four novels anonymously during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). The two novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously, in 1817. Austen's legacy also includes two unfinished works, The Watsons and Sandition. Her novels, focusing on courtship and marriage, remain well-known for their satiric depictions of English society and the manners of the era. Her insights into the lives of women during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century Regency period –in addition to her ability to handle form, satire, and irony – have made her one of the most studied and influential novelists of her time. As with many great authors, however, her death preceded her renown.

Austen's portrait – a colored sketch by her sister Cassandra – is available for viewing at the National Portrait Gallery in London.