Jane Austen
Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817) was the seventh of eight children born to George and Cassandra Austen. Both parents were members of lower ranks of the landed gentry. Her father was the rector of Anglican parishes in Steventon, Hampshire. She was educated by her father and brothers, and her family was supportive of her artistic ambitions. In her early twenties she began publishing novels of romantic fiction set among the landed gentry that focus on relationships and marriage as the only path available for women to achieve economic security and social standing. Although the plots of her books are quite comic, she is unsparing in her depiction of the people and the manners of the times and finds abundant opportunities for satire and trenchant social commentary. Jane Austen was relatively unknown in her lifetime. Although she published four popular novels in rapid succession between 1811 and 1815, they were published anonymously and she had few reviews and little recognition. Her nephew published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 that introduced her to a broader audience, and by the middle of the 20th century she was recognized by academia as one of the great English writers. Her focus on the realities of the lives of women in the late 18th and early 19th centuries gained even greater currency with the advent of feminism and women’s studies. Her work has a large and ardent fan base that results in her works consistently ranking among the top best selling and most highly regarded classics in all literature. |
Emma
Published in three volumes in 1815, Emma was the second to last of Jane Austen’s novels, and treats ..
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Mansfield Park
Fanny Price is the eldest daughter in a family of nine children struggling to get by on a naval offi..
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Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is one of the early novels of Jane Austen, the first to be submitted for publicatio..
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Persuasion
Jane Austen completed her last novel, Persuasion, in 1816, the year before her death in 1817 at the ..
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Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice, a novel of manners, was first published in 1813 and remains one of the best lov..
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Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility under the pseudonym, “A Lady” in 1811. It is an epistola..
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