Jane Austen was born on 16 December, 1775, at the rectory in the
village of Steventon, near Basingstoke, in Hampshire. The seventh
of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife,
Cassandra, she was educated mainly at home and never lived apart
from her family. She had a happy childhood amongst all her brothers
and the other boys who lodged with the family and whom Mr Austen
tutored. From her older sister, Cassandra, she was inseparable. To
amuse themselves, the children wrote and performed plays and charades,
and even as a little girl Jane was encouraged to write. The reading that she
did of the books in her father's extensive library provided material for the
short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl.
At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Friendship and then
A History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian,
together with other very amusing juvenilia. In her early twenties Jane
Austen wrote the novels that were later to be re-worked and published
as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.
She also began a novel called The Watsons which was never completed.
