Jane Austen was an English novelist, born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. She was educated largely at home in a close, book-loving family, and began writing as a teenager, producing parodies and short works that displayed her early gift for satire and social observation.
Austen's mature novels, published anonymously during her lifetime, are now regarded as masterpieces of English literature. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma appeared between 1811 and 1816, with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published after her death. Through the courtship and marriage plots of the English gentry, she examined questions of money, class, morality, and women's limited choices with unmatched wit and irony.
Her novels are celebrated for their sparkling dialogue, finely drawn characters, and acute social comedy, as well as their quiet moral seriousness. Pride and Prejudice, with its sharp-tongued heroine Elizabeth Bennet, remains one of the most beloved novels in the English language.
Austen never married and lived a relatively quiet life within her family circle. She died in 1817 at the age of forty-one, probably of Addison's disease. Although she enjoyed only modest fame in her lifetime, she is now considered one of the greatest novelists in the English tradition, her work the subject of countless adaptations and enduring devotion.
