Persuasion (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in England, to George and Cassandra (Leigh) Austen. Her father was a clergyman in Steventon, a small town in Hampshire County. Her mother, whose ancestors were titled, was born into a higher social class. She and her husband settled into a comfortable but modest life, associating with the local gentry and raising eight children. Jane's close relationship with her siblings and her family's relationship with the local gentry would provide her with material for her plots and influence her creation of the settings and characterizations in her novels.

Austen received only five years of formal schooling; however, she continued her education at home. When she was in her teens, she wrote plays, verses, short novels, and other prose works, which were primarily parodies of sentimental fiction. Soon she began writing Elinor and Marianne, an early version of Sense and Sensibility, and after that, First Impressions, which later became Pride and Prejudice. Even though a London publishing house rejected the draft of the latter work after her father had submitted it, the novel was heartily enjoyed by her family and a wide circle of acquaintances.

Scholars divide Austen's literary career into an early and a late period separated by a writing hiatus of eight years. The first includes her early writings, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (both published in 1811), and Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published posthumously in 1818). Her late period includes Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (published posthumously along with Northanger Abbey in 1818. During the eight-year hiatus, Austen moved frequently with her family, staying in Bath, London, Clifton, Warwickshire, and Southampton, where they moved after her father died in 1805.

Austen started writing her last novel, which the family would later title Sandition, in 1817. She had not completed the novel when she died, most likely of Addison's disease, on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, England.

During her lifetime, Austen's works were well received, especially Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, yet since all her works were published anonymously, she was not well known by the public. After her death, when her brother revealed her authorship, scholars began critiquing her work. By the end of the nineteenth century, she came to be regarded as one of the most important English novelists, a position she retains today.