A memoir of the author
Jane Austen
In brief
A clergyman's daughter, born at Steventon rectory, the seventh of eight children. She died at Winchester at forty-one.
She published four novels in her lifetime and put her name to none of them. The first title page said only “By a Lady”.
Pride and Prejudice was the second. She had first written it in her early twenties as First Impressions, and waited more than fifteen years to see it in print.
The life
I. Steventon 1775–1801
Her father, George Austen, was rector of Steventon and took in boys as pupils; the rectory held them and her six brothers. Her closest companion all her life was her one sister, Cassandra, nearly three years older. Between about twelve and seventeen she filled three notebooks with stories, plays and burlesques written to amuse the family.
In 1796 and 1797 she wrote a novel called First Impressions. On 1 November 1797 her father offered it to the London publisher Thomas Cadell. It was declined, as her nephew put it, by return of post.
II. Bath and Southampton 1801–1809
In 1801 her father retired and took the family to Bath. In December 1802, staying with friends at Manydown, she accepted a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, the heir to the house, and withdrew her acceptance the next morning. The next year she sold a novel called Susan to a publisher for £10. He never printed it.
Her father died in Bath in January 1805. In 1806 his widow and daughters moved to Southampton.
III. Chawton 1809–1817
From July 1809 she lived with her mother, Cassandra and their friend Martha Lloyd in a cottage at Chawton, on the estate of her brother Edward. There she went back to her old manuscripts. Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811, “By a Lady”. In November 1812 she sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice to Thomas Egerton for £110 (“I would rather have had £150”), and it was published on 28 January 1813.
Mansfield Park followed in 1814, and Emma in December 1815, dedicated to the Prince Regent after his librarian let her know she might. She fell ill in 1816, went to Winchester for treatment in May 1817, and died there on 18 July. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral. That December her brother Henry's “Biographical Notice”, printed with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, told the public her name.
In their own words
“I have got my own darling child from London.”
That evening she and her mother read half the first volume aloud to a neighbour, Miss Benn, without telling her who had written it.
Text as printed by Lord Brabourne (1884), in Susan Coolidge's selection (1892).
“A ‘said he,’ or a ‘said she,’ would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear.”
Then, cheerfully unrepentant: “I do not write for such dull elves” as can't work it out.
Brabourne (1884), in Coolidge (1892).
“The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling: it wants shade.”
She suggests, with a straight face, a long chapter on something unconnected with the story.
Brabourne (1884), in Coolidge (1892). The manuscript has “&” for “and”.
“The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush.”
She was reassuring him that she could not have stolen his chapters: they would never have fitted.
J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870).
The works
On our shelf
The other works
Unfinished and early
A short novel in letters, Lady Susan; The Watsons, abandoned; Sanditon, left unfinished at her death; and three notebooks of early writing. Not at Standard Ebooks.
How to read them
- Pride and Prejudice, the one most readers begin with.
- Sense and Sensibility, her first in print, and the nearest to it in spirit.
- Northanger Abbey, whenever you want something short and very funny.
- Emma, once her irony is familiar; it's her longest.
- Mansfield Park, which opens slowly, with many people to meet.
- Persuasion, which readers often advise against as a first Austen.
Or read them in the order she published them, from 1811 to 1817.
The world they wrote in
- 18s.Eighteen shillings: the price of Pride and Prejudice's three volumes when the first advertisement ran.Her letter of 29 January 1813
- £110What Egerton paid for the copyright, once and for all. A curate lived on about £50 a year.Her letter to Martha Lloyd, 29 November 1812
- By a LadyHow Sense and Sensibility was signed. The next books said only “By the Author of” the one before.The title pages, 1811–1815
Likenesses
Drawn from life
By her sister Cassandra, pencil and watercolour, about 1810; 114 × 80 mm. The only portrait of her face made in her lifetime, and unfinished. National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 3630).
After the sketch, softened
Engraved by W. H. Lizars after James Andrews's watercolour, for the Memoir of 1870. The face is rounder and milder than Cassandra's.
From life, private
Cassandra's watercolour of 1804, showing her from behind. Still in the family's collection.
After the last page
More on Pride and Prejudice opens at THE END.
Sources
This memoir was written for Gentle Reader and checked against the sources below. Quotations from letters are from public-domain printings.
- A Jane Austen Society of North America, “Jane Austen” (biography and chronology).
- A Jane Austen's House, Chawton: timeline; “The making of Pride and Prejudice”.
- A National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 3630, catalogue entry.
- A Deirdre Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen's Letters, 4th edn (Oxford, 2011).
- A · period J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870); Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Lord Brabourne (1884), selected by Susan Coolidge (1892).
- A · period Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author” (1817). Leslie Stephen, Dictionary of National Biography (1885), consulted and corrected.
- B Encyclopædia Britannica, “Did Jane Austen marry?”.