Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born December 16th, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, England near Basingstoke.She was the seventh child out of eight and the second daughter out of two, of the Rev. George Austen, 1731-1805 the local rector, or Church of England clergyman, and his wife Cassandra, 1739-1827 nee Leigh. See the silhouettes of Jane Austens father and mother, apparently taken at different ages. He had a fairly respectable income of about 600 a year, supplemented by tutoring pupils who came to live with him, but was by no means rich especially with eight children, and like Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice couldnt have given his daughters much to marry on. More than one reader has wondered whether the childhood of the character Catherine Morland in Jane Austens novel Northanger Abbey might not reflect her own childhood, at least in part Catherine enjoys rolling down the green slope at the back of the house and prefers cricket and baseball to girls play. In 1783, Jane and her older sister Cassandra went briefly to be taught by a Mrs. Cawley the sister of one of their uncles, who lived first in Oxford and then moved to 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, which apparently bore some resemblance to Mrs. Goddards casual school in Emma. Jane was considered almost too young to benefit from the school, but their mother is reported to have said that if Cassandras head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have hers cut off too. This was Jane Austens only education outside her family.

Within their family, the two girls learned drawing, to play the piano, etc. See Accomplishments and Womens Education.Jane Austen did a fair amount of reading, of both the serious and the popular literature of the day her father had a library of 500 books by 1801, and she wrote that she and her family were great novel readers, and not ashamed of being so. However decorous she later chose to be in her own novels, she was very familiar with eighteenth century novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson, which were much less inhibited than those of the later near-Victorian era. She frequently reread Richardsons Sir Charles Grandison, and also enjoyed the novels of Fanny Burney a.k.a. Madame DArblay.

She later got the title for Pride and Prejudice from a phrase in Burneys Cecilia, and when Burneys Camilla came out in 1796, one of the subscribers was Miss J. Austen, Steventon.

The three novels that she praised in her famous Defense of the Novel in Northanger Abbey were Burneys Cecilia and Camilla, and Maria Edgeworths Belinda. See also the diagram of Jane Austens literary influences. See the Index of allusions to books and authors in Jane Austens writings.In 1782 and 1784, plays were staged by the Austen family at Steventon rectory, and in 1787-1788 more elaborate productions were put on there under the influence of Janes sophisticated grown-up cousin Eliza de Feuillide to whom Love and Freindship is dedicated.

This throws an interesting light on Jane Austens apparent disapproval of such amateur theatricals in her novel Mansfield Park though Mansfield Park was written over twenty years afterwards, in a moral climate closer to the Victorian era also, in 1788 one Charlotte Anne Frances Wattell eloped to Scotland with a son of the scandal-plagued Twistleton family, remotely connected by marriage with Jane Austens family Mr. Twistleton and Miss Wattell had been acting together in amateur theatricals see Tucker, p.152. Jane Austen wrote her Juvenilia 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 most of the pieces are dedicated to one or another of her relatives or family 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 at this early period, their working titles were Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan respectively. Lady Susan was also probably written during this period.In 1797, First ImpressionsPride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher by Jane Austens father, but the publisher declined to even look at the manuscript.

Biography Study Guidefor students More pictures of Jane AustenJane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from 18th century neo-classicism to 19th century romanticism. 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 fathers 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 Freindship sic 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. Jane Austen was born into the rural professional middle class.

Her father, George Austen 1731-1805, was a country clergyman at Steventon, a small village in the southern English county of Hampshire. He had risen by merit from a Kentish family in trade and the lower professions.Jane Austens mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen 1739-1827, was from a higher social rank, minor gentry related distantly to titled people, but once she married the Reverend Austen in 1764 she entered wholeheartedly and with humor into the domestic life and responsibilities of managing a household economy by no means luxurious, bearing eight children six sons and two daughters.

In this setting the Austens mingled easily with other gentrified professionals and with local gentry families. Yet they were also linked, though tenuously in some ways, with the larger world of fashionable society and of patronage, politics, and state.George Austen owed his education at Oxford University to his own merit as a student at Tonbridge School, but he owed his clerical position, or living, at Steventon to the patronage of a wealthy relative, Thomas Knight of Godmersham Park, Kent, who held the appointment in his gift. Later the Knights, who were childless, adopted one of the Austens sons, Edward, as their own son and heir to their estates in Kent and Hampshire.

One of Jane Austens cousins, Elizabeth Eliza Hancock, married a French aristocrat Jean Capotte, Comte de Feuillide.The family members were readers, though more in literature of the day than abstruse learning.

There was also a great deal of reading aloud in the Austen household. Jane Austen was helped by her father to select from his five-hundred-volume library, and there were, of course, books from circulating libraries. These rental libraries, greatly varying in extent of stock and luxury of appointment, specialized in lighter reading.Jane and her sister, also Cassandra, were sent to school in Oxford and Southampton, before attending the Abbey School in Reading, and were encouraged to write from an early age. Jane started writing novels in 1790, at the age of only 14, while she was living in Steventon, although her first novel to be published, Sense and Sensibility, did not appear until 1811. Although her early life appeared secure enough, it was touched by tragedy.

Her cousin, Eliza Hancock, married a French nobleman, who was arrested and guillotined on his return to Paris soon after the French Revolution.Her aunt, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, was arrested when falsely accused of stealing a card of lace, and suffered eight months imprisonment with the threat of the death penalty, before she was able to prove her innocence. On her fathers retirement, in 1801, the family moved to Bath. Janes years at Bath were not happy.

The family made acquaintances, but few friends.Their stay at Bath was broken up by annual excursions to the seaside to Sidmouth, Dawlish and Lyme Regis. As was the custom, the sons of the family pursued careers two of Janes brothers joined the Navy, while the daughters stayed at home, awaiting marriage and involving themselves with domestic affairs.

A neighbour from their Hampshire days, Harris Bigg-Wither of Manydown Park Wootton St. Lawrence asked Jane to marry him in the Winter of 1802. Though she initially accepted, a sleepless night saw the poor man turned down the following morning.Jane Austens novels were witty, warm and ironic portraits of the privileged classes of 18th- and 19th-century England.

Her best-known works are Emma 1815, Pride and Prejudice 1813 and Sense and Sensibility 1811, though due to the status of women authors at the time, most of her novels were published anonymously.