Welcome to the Jane Austen section. This writer is one of the most important Victorian writers and amongst my favorite authors. In this section you will learn a little about Jane Austen's person and on one of her most beloved works, Pride and prejudice.


Jane Austen was born December 16th, 1775 at Steventon. She was the seventh child out of eight. The Austen family wasn't of means. In 1783, Jane and her older sister Cassandra went briefly to be taught by a private teacher in Southampton. They were brought home after an infectious disease broke out in Southampton. In 1785-1786 Jane and Cassandra went to the Abbey boarding school in Reading.Jane Austen did a fair amount of reading, of both the serious and the popular literature of the day.

Jane Austen wrote her early works from 1787 to 1793; they include many humorous parodies of the literature of the day, such as Love and Freindship, and are collected in three manuscript volumes. They were originally written for the amusement of her family and friends.Earlier versions of the novels eventually published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey were all begun and worked on from 1795 to 1799. Though Jane Austen loved society there is little solid evidence of any serious courtships with men.

In late 1800 her father, who was nearly 70, suddenly decided to retire to Bath and the family moved there the next year. In 1803 Jane Austen actually sold Northanger Abbey to a publisher, for the far-from-magnificent sum of £10; however, the publisher chose not to publish it. It was probably toward the end of the Bath years that Jane Austen began The Watsons, but this novel was abandoned in fragmentary form.In January 1805 her father died. As would have been the case for the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice if Mr. Bennet had died, the income due to the remaining family (Mrs. Austen and her two daughters, the only children still at home) was considerably reduced -- since most of Mr. Austen's income had come from clerical "livings" which lapsed with his death. So they were largely dependent on support from the Austen brothers (and a relatively small amount of money left to Cassandra by her fiancé.



In 1806 Jane Austen moved from Bath, first to Clifton, and then, in autumn 1806, to Southampton. In 1809 Jane Austen, her mother, sister Cassandra, and Martha Lloyd moved to Chawton, near Alton and Winchester, where her brother Edward provided a small house on one of his estates. This was in Hampshire, not far from her childhood home of Steventon. Before leaving Southampton, she corresponded with the dilatory publisher to whom she had sold Susan (i.e. Northanger Abbey), but without receiving any satisfaction.She resumed her literary activities soon after returning into Hampshire, and revised Sense and Sensibility, which was accepted in late 1810 or early 1811 by a publisher, for publication at her own risk. The novel became became a success.Encouraged by this success, Jane Austen turned to revising First Impressions, a.k.a. Pride and Prejudice. She sold it in November 1812, and you can find the complete Pride and Prejudice story on this site, Inspired to dream.

She died on Friday, July 18th 1817, aged 41. It was not known then what had caused her death, but it seems likely that it was Addison's disease.



Above you can see Jane Austen's house







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