Jane austen short biography
During the cold winter of , at the rectory in Steventon in Hampshire, a chubby-faced, dark-eyed baby girl was born whose life would later be popularly characterised as uneventful.
Biography of jane austen and celebrated works of famous While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Did Jane Austen have children. The heroine is a woman growing older with a sense that life has passed her by. She continued to write, developing her style in more ambitious works such as Lady Susan , another epistolary story about a manipulative woman who uses her sexuality, intelligence and charm to have her way with others.But that is not quite true.
Jane Austen grew up to see four of her now world-famous novels published – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma – while Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon appeared posthumously. Also adapted for countless TV, film and stage dramas, her works are celebrated for their wit, irony and sharp social observations, not least on courtship and marriage.
But what of Jane’s own life?
Check out some of the most beautiful Jane Austen filming locations in England here.
Born years ago, on 16 December , the second daughter and seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra, Jane was surrounded by a creative, lively family.
From to she was sent to boarding schools in Oxford, Southampton and Reading with her beloved older sister, also named Cassandra, a time during which she narrowly escaped death from typhus fever.
Jane’s formal education ended when she was 11 years old, but, a voracious reader, she had the run of her father’s library at home, and with her siblings revelled in games, theatricals and writing.
Biography of jane austen and celebrated works This page has been archived and is no longer updated. It is believed that Jane may have picked up Latin from staying close to home and listening in on these lessons. Today, Austen is considered one of the greatest writers in English history, both by academics and the general public. At some point, Austen's condition deteriorated to such a degree that she ceased writing.The Austens took in boys (the oldest around 14 to 15) and ran a small school to supplement the reverend’s clerical income alongside their small farm.
Jane had inherited her mother’s clever wit and love of words, and perhaps the boyish bustle in the house rubbed off on her too. Certainly, the stories she wrote in her late childhood and teens (some now held by the British Library in London and Oxford’s Bodleian Library) burst with anarchic, all-action scenes.
Young people, particularly girls, encourage each other to “disentangle themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority”; they get drunk, eat too much, steal money, get into fights; there are murders and a girl’s face turns “as White as Whipt syllabub” when her intended husband is killed. The stories mock girls’ limited educations and expectations, as well as literary fashions like slow-moving, long-winded novels-in-letters.
Jane wrote her tales to entertain family and friends, dedicating them to nearest-and-dearest like her sister, “the beautifull [sic] Cassandra”, and her adored older cousin Eliza who probably inspired her love of piano playing.
Another influential female in Jane’s young life was the wife of a neighbouring rector, the elegant, well-read Madam Lefroy who, a writer of poetry, became something of a mentor.
There are conflicting descriptions of Jane’s appearance, and her sister’s pencil-and-watercolour portrait of her – the only known contemporary image showing her face – has been claimed to be not a very good likeness.
Her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, who first wrote a memoir of his aunt in , describes “a clear brunette with a rich colour full round cheeks with mouth and nose small and well formed and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face not so regularly handsome as her sister”.
Jane’s sister Cassandra was already engaged to a former pupil of the Reverend Austen when, in January , she received a letter from a now year-old Jane that included news of a love-interest of her own: a “gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man”, with whom she had been flirting and dancing at local balls.
Biography of jane austen and celebrated works of art Austen's parents were well-respected community members. Again the heroine does engage the reader's sympathy and understanding. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. He chronicled the experience in an article titled "Rejecting Jane," a fitting tribute to an author who could appreciate humor and wit.Alas, neither Jane nor Tom Lefroy, a law student on a visit from Ireland to his Aunt and Uncle Lefroy, had the wherewithal to permit the prospect of a marriage. In a subsequent letter to Cassandra, Jane writes, half-joking, half-serious: “the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over – My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.”
Jane never saw Tom again and poor Cassandra’s fiancé tragically died on a trip to the Caribbean.
Neither sister would marry, although there are hints of a summer romance for Jane in Devon in , and one evening in December she even accepted a proposal from the well-to-do brother of some friends – only to retract the next day, explaining she had made a mistake. Such a marriage, for financial security alone, was not a compromise Jane could make.
The two sisters remained almost inseparable and when apart they wrote letters to each other practically daily.
Jane austen biography There is much evidence to support the argument of some critics that Emma is Austen's most brilliant novel. Austen's parents were well-respected community members. Over the span of her life, Austen would become especially close to her father and older sister, Cassandra. From her mid-twenties, though, Jane found her life so disrupted that she wrote little for another eight years.Those by Jane that survive – gossipy, humorous, scathing – provide intriguing insights into her personality. In London, where she enjoyed visiting shops and the theatre, she writes laughingly of being “in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted”. Or she writes of stays in Kent, where her brother Edward had been adopted by wealthy relatives and, living in some style, “excels in doing the honours to his visitors, and providing for their amusement”; less kindly she snipes at some Kentish gentlewomen: “they called, they came and they sat and they went”.
Interestingly, Jane, ‘the poor relation’, forged a lasting friendship with Anne Sharp, governess to Edward’s children, who like Jane harboured writing ambitions.
All the while at Steventon in the latter half of the s, Jane had been assiduously drafting the stories that would become Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice – her father approached a publisher with the latter but was declined.
From her mid-twenties, though, Jane found her life so disrupted that she wrote little for another eight years.
On retiring in , her father had suddenly uprooted his wife and two daughters to Bath: a place that Jane had previously found enjoyable to visit, but hated as a home with its unending social round (“Another stupid party last night”).
Seaside holidays including to Devon and Lyme Regis in Dorset leavened the experience, but otherwise a constant shuttling between Bath, relatives and friends left Jane unsettled.
When her father died in , the impecunious Austen women, relying on support from Jane’s brothers, sought cheaper lodgings in Southampton.
Fortunately, in Jane’s brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a house on his Chawton estate in Hampshire – now preserved as Jane Austen’s House – and here within around seven years the author revised and wrote her six famous novels: “it seems that [she] needed the sense of a safe and secure home to be able to truly flourish creatively,” says Lizzie Dunford, Director of Jane Austen’s House, adding: “the household here was set up in a way that enabled her to write.
Her sister Cassandra and sister-in-law Martha oversaw the housekeeping, and Austen’s key job in this all-female household was to make breakfast, alongside ordering the tea and coffee supplies.” It left her ample time to work on her novels on the tiny sided table still to be seen in the dining room.
Lizzie paints a happy picture of Jane enjoying country life, reading, writing, socialising, and “she often played the pianoforte for her nephews and nieces to dance to”.
Beginning with the publication in of Sense and Sensibility “by a Lady” (Jane’s name never appeared on her work in her lifetime) she earned some welcome money and modest public plaudits for her novels. Yet even this fruitful period would be cruelly cut short in when, aged just 41 years old, Jane died, possibly from Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Today, of course, Jane Austen lives on through her words, drawing us into the turn-of-theth-century world of the country gentry with her shrewd wit and piercing eye, often distilling elements of places and people she knew into her fiction.
This anniversary year is the perfect time to rediscover her novels and follow in her footsteps.