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Jane Austen

Jane Austen never put her name on a novel in her lifetime, wrote at a tiny table in a busy sitting room, and now stares out from the £10 note.

Published

Jane Austen
Photo: Cassandra Austen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Quick Facts

Born
16 December 1775, Steventon, Hampshire
Died
18 July 1817, Winchester, aged 41
Famous for
Six completed novels, from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion
Published as
"By a Lady" and later "By the Author of Pride and Prejudice"
Home that is now a museum
Jane Austen's House, Chawton, Hampshire
Buried
Winchester Cathedral
Siblings
Six brothers and one sister, Cassandra
Posthumous publications
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, issued together in December 1817

The author nobody was allowed to name

When Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, the title page said only "By a Lady". Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, credited to "the Author of Sense and Sensibility". Austen's name never appeared on a book in her lifetime. She was not entirely hidden. Her brother Henry let slip her identity to a few people, and she eventually learned that the Prince Regent was a fan. His librarian invited her to dedicate a book to him, and she did: Emma, in 1815. Her income from writing was modest. Sense and Sensibility was published at her own risk, and it earned her a profit of around £140.

A novelist at the sitting-room door

Austen grew up in Steventon rectory, where her father, George, ran a boarding school for boys and a house full of books. She wrote for family amusement from her teens, producing sharp, silly burlesques now known as her Juvenilia. Later, at Chawton, she wrote in the main living room. A family memoir by her nephew describes a creaking door that she liked to leave unfixed, because it warned her when someone was coming and she could slip her papers out of sight. The small round table she is said to have used is still on display in the house at Chawton.

The sister who burned the letters

Jane and her sister Cassandra were inseparable, and wrote to each other constantly. Several hundred letters are thought to have existed. Only around 160 survive. After Jane's death, Cassandra destroyed many of them and cut passages out of others. Why she did it is unknown, which is part of the frustration for biographers. What remains is full of gossip, dresses, dances and wicked asides about neighbours. Cassandra also made the one authenticated portrait of Jane from life: a small, unfinished pencil and watercolour sketch. It is not flattering, and Jane's family did not think it a good likeness.

Why the books changed fiction

Austen wrote about ordinary people in country villages, and made it gripping. Money, marriage and manners drive the plots, and the heroines have to think their way through them. Her great technical trick was free indirect speech, which slips into a character's thoughts without announcing it. It lets her irony work from inside the story, and later novelists made it central to modern fiction. Her books were mocking as well as romantic. Northanger Abbey sends up Gothic novels, while Emma follows a heroine who is wrong about almost everything, and the reader loves her anyway.

The short, final chapter

Austen fell ill in 1816, and in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near a doctor. She died there on 18 July, aged 41. The cause has been debated ever since, with Addison's disease and Hodgkin's lymphoma among the suggestions. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Her gravestone praises her personal qualities but does not mention that she was a writer. A brass plaque and memorial window were added later. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion came out together in December 1817. This was the first time her name was linked to her books, in a biographical notice by her brother Henry.

Where you can still find her

Jane Austen's House at Chawton is the best place to start: it is the cottage where she revised her early novels and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Winchester Cathedral holds her grave. Bath, where she lived from 1801 to 1806, has the Jane Austen Centre, and its streets and Assembly Rooms feature in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Lyme Regis's Cobb is where Louisa Musgrove takes her tumble in Persuasion. She also appears on the Bank of England £10 note, introduced in 2017 to mark 200 years since her death.

Notable people

  • Jane Austen
  • Cassandra Austen
  • Henry Austen
  • George Austen
  • Prince Regent (George IV)
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