A Family of [eight] children will always be called a fine family, where there are head and arms and legs enough for the number.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Jane was born during a particularly cold winter on 16 December 1775 in Steventon Parsonage, a tiny village in Hampshire.
She was the daughter of the Reverend George and Cassandra Austen, and was the seventh of eight children. She had a happy and close-knit family, with her brothers James, Edward, Henry Thomas, Francis William, Charles John and George, as well as her sister Cassandra to whom she was particularly close.
Jane started writing at a young age, and her Juvenilia includes dramatic sketches, spoofs and poems. It was written to amuse the members of her family, including her youngest brother Charles. Cassandra was a talented artist, and painted portraits in Jane’s sketch books, including Mary Queen of Scots, that some speculate is a portrait of Jane.
Friends and family circulated her writings and wooed publishers, but it was over a decade before Sense and Sensibility went into print in 1811, soon followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, which Jane called ‘my own darling child’.
After spending the first 25 years of her life in Steventon, Jane’s father retired and moved the family to Bath in 1801. Bath was an inspiration for Jane, with its balls, dancing, gossip and fashion, keeping her busy until her father died in 1805. Due to their reduced circumstances, the Austen ladies moved to Southampton and live with Jane’s brother Frank and his new wife. During these unsettled years, they visited friends and family, including her brother Edward who had been adopted by Thomas and Elizabeth Knight. He inherited estates at Godmersham, Kent and Chawton, Hampshire, and took the name Knight.
In 1809, Edward offered Jane, Cassandra, their mother and close friend Martha Lloyd a cottage in Chawton. Set in a beautiful Hampshire village, close to Edward ‘Great House’ it was where Jane began writing again, and all six of her novels date in their finished form from this period. Jane wrote to her brother Frank telling him he had a son, and was so happy, she included the Chawton move in the last lines of the poem.
Our Chawton home, how much we find
Already in it, to our mind;
And how convinced, that when complete
It will all other Houses beat
The ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise, or rooms distended.
You’ll find us very snug next year,
Perhaps with Charles and Fanny near,
For now it often does delight us
To fancy them just over-right us.–
In 1814 Mansfield Park was published, and with its heroine whom Jane half-jokingly predicted ‘no one but myself will much like‘, Emma followed in 1815.
Jane had been ill for about a year when in January 1817 she started writing Sanditon. She put down her quill in the March of that year as she was too ill to write. Her family took her to Winchester to seek better medical treatment from a Dr Lyford, renting rooms in College Street. He could not save her and she died in the arms of her sister Cassandra on 18 July 1817.
It was after her death that her final two novels Persuasion and her Gothic satire Northanger Abbey were published together.
Jane Austen remains one of the top selling authors and over thirty million of her books have been sold worldwide.