Jane Austen

• 1. Introduction

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  Jane Austen wrote major novels before the age of 22, yet she was not published until she was 35. When her first book appeared in 1811, the title page did not carry her name. It said only that the work was written "By a Lady." She would die in 1817 at the age of 41 without her name ever appearing on any of her novels.

  Her father, the Reverend George Austen, announced her arrival in a letter, writing that the newborn was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion." That companion would go on to interpret and quietly critique the English landed gentry at the close of the 18th century. Her plots circle one hard fact: a woman's dependence on marriage for social standing and economic security.

  So how did a clergyman's daughter from rural Hampshire become a writer ranked, by some, with Shakespeare? Why did her own sister burn the bulk of her letters? And how did a near-anonymous author whose books went out of print in the 1820s become the subject of something one critic called "Austenolatry"? The answers run from a barn theatre in Steventon to a grave in Winchester Cathedral.

• 2. A Family Of Readers

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  George Austen earned an annual income of £200 from his two livings as rector of Steventon and Deane. That was a very modest sum. A skilled blacksmith or carpenter might make about £100 a year, while a typical gentry family lived on between £1,000 and £5,000. He rented the 200-acre Cheesedown farm, which could turn a profit of £300 a year, and from 1773 until 1796 he supplemented his income by teaching three or four boarding boys at a time.

  The biographer Park Honan described the Austen home as having an "open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere," where the family considered and discussed ideas even when they disagreed. Jane attended church, danced at the assembly rooms in the town hall, and read novels aloud to her family in the evenings, often of her own composition. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it."

  The family carried hidden chapters. Her brother George had undiagnosed developmental challenges, suffered seizures, and may have been deaf and mute. He was sent to be fostered away from the home, as was common at the time. The wealthy Aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot was arrested, tried, and acquitted on charges of grand larceny. Both stories would later be quietly omitted from the family's accounts of Jane.

  Visitors widened her world. Her father's sister Philadelphia and her daughter Eliza Hancock brought news of foreign travels and fashionable London life. Le Faye called them "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire." That cousin Eliza, whose French husband the Comte de Feuillide was guillotined in 1794, would one day marry Jane's brother Henry.

• 3. Schooling And First Pages

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  In 1783 Jane and her sister Cassandra were sent to be educated by Ann Cawley, first in Oxford and then in Southampton. That autumn both girls were sent home after catching typhus, of which Jane nearly died. The sisters later attended the Reading Abbey Girls' School from early 1785, but returned home before December 1786 because the fees were too high for the family.

  After 1786 Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment." Her real education came from reading, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry. She had unfettered access to her father's library and to that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Irene Collins observed that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys."

  The rectory barn doubled as a theatre. From early childhood the family and friends staged plays there, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Most of these were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12 she tried her own hand at dramatic writing, producing three short plays during her teenage years.

  From at least the age of eleven, she wrote poems and stories to amuse her family. Between 1787 and 1793 she compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks running to 90,000 words, now known as the Juvenilia. The scholar Richard Jenkyns called them "boisterous" and "anarchic," comparing them to the work of Laurence Sterne.

• 4. Anarchic Fantasies

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  Love and Freindship, written in 1790 when Austen was fourteen, mocked the popular novels of sensibility. The following year she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by Cassandra. It parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England of 1764.

  Janet Todd described these early stories as "full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits." Honan speculates that not long after Love and Freindship, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort," that is, to become a professional writer. In August 1792, aged seventeen, she started Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work.

  Lady Susan, written between 1793 and 1795, stands apart from everything else she produced. Claire Tomalin describes its heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her lovers, friends, and family. Tomalin wrote that it is "as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists." According to Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide.

• 5. Suitors And Silence

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  Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796, when Austen was twenty. In her first surviving letter to Cassandra she called him a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man," and confessed to behaving in a way "most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Jane never saw him again, and none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him.

  In December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger brother of her friends Alethea and Catherine Bigg, was heir to extensive family estates in the area where the sisters had grown up. By Caroline Austen's account he was a large, plain-looking man who stuttered, spoke little, and was almost completely tactless. Austen accepted him one evening and withdrew her acceptance by the next morning.

  Years later, in 1814, her niece Fanny Knight asked her for advice about a relationship. Austen replied, "Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection." Douglas Bush wrote that Austen held "a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife."

  Much of what she felt is lost. Cassandra destroyed the bulk of the roughly 3,000 letters Jane wrote in her lifetime; only about 160 survive. One theory holds that Cassandra wanted to keep younger nieces from reading Jane's "sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members." The years from 1801 to 1804 are, as a result, a near-blank space for scholars.

• 6. The Business Of Anonymity

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  Crosby & Company paid Austen £10 for the copyright to the manuscript that became Northanger Abbey, advertised it as being "in the press," and then did nothing. The book sat unpublished for years. Austen could not afford to buy the copyright back until 1816. That experience left her wary, because a sold copyright meant a single payment and no further claim on her own work.

  Most of Austen's novels were published "on commission," meaning the author carried the financial risk. The publisher advanced the costs, repaid himself from sales, charged a 10% commission, and passed the rest to the author. If a book failed to recover its costs, the author owed them. Selling by subscription was not an option for her, since that route was open only to well-known writers or those with an aristocratic patron.

  Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, sold on commission and described as written "By a Lady." Reviews were favourable, the edition sold out by mid-1813, and Austen made £140 from it. After that, her books were billed as written "By the author of Sense and Sensibility." Her name never appeared on her novels during her lifetime.

  Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813. Austen sold its copyright to Egerton for £110. Had she instead published it on commission, she would have made a profit of £475, twice her father's annual income. Mansfield Park came in May 1814, ignored by reviewers but popular with readers, selling out within six months. In 1815 she moved to the publisher John Murray, who released Emma in December of that year.

• 7. Manners And Irony

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  Walter Scott praised Austen for her "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction," what he called "the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries." Her works critique the sentimental novels of the later 18th century and belong to the transition toward 19th-century literary realism. Critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

  Austen was the first English novelist to make extensive use of free indirect speech, a technique that presents a character's thoughts directly while keeping narrative control. The scholar Mary Lascelles wrote, "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters." Her dialogue carries mood through sentence structure. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted, convoluted speech reveals how deeply he has wounded her.

  Gothic fiction was a target she chose to transform rather than simply reject. Between 1784 and 1818, thirty-two novels contained the word "abbey" in their titles. In Northanger Abbey she plays on the trope, then traps her heroine not in a remote castle but in the mundane real world of regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom.

  John Bayley argued that the well-spring of her wit was her own belief that comedy "is the saving grace of life." Robert Polhemus wrote that to appreciate her, "we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule." Part of her fame rests on a simple historical fact: she was the first woman to write great comic novels.

• 8. Death And Afterlife

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  Austen felt unwell by early 1816 but ignored the warning signs. She made light of her condition, calling it "bile" and rheumatism, even as she wrote of herself turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa." She put down her pen on the 18th of March 1817 and made a note of it. In May, Cassandra and Henry took her to Winchester for treatment. She died there on the 18th of July 1817 at the age of 41.

  Her cause of death is debated. Most biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis of Addison's disease, though her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin's lymphoma. Henry arranged for her burial in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praised the "extraordinary endowments of her mind" but never mentioned her achievements as a writer.

  In the months after her death, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published together as a set. Henry's Biographical Note, dated December 1817, for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Although her six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still read through private and circulating libraries.

  The turning point came in the 1830s. In 1832 Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all her novels and published them in his Standard Novels series, which called her "the founder of a school of novelists." Her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, introduced the legend of "dear aunt Jane" and spurred new editions. By the 1880s, Leslie Stephen could describe a popular mania he named "Austenolatry." In 1994 Harold Bloom placed her among the greatest Western writers of all time, and her face now appears on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England in 2017.