Jane Austen

Biography

Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817) was a British novelist whose realism, biting social commentary and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely-read and best-loved writers in British literature.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she wrote three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1815, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published after her death in 1817, and began a third (eventually titled Sanditon), but died before it could be completed.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Austen's plots, although fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Like Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, her works are concerned with moral issues.

During her own lifetime, Austen's works brought her little fame and only a few positive reviews. During the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired only by a literary elite. However, with the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of the Life of Jane Austen in 1870, her works became visible to a wider public. By the 1940s, Austen was firmly ensconced in academia as a "great English writer" and the second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, exploring every avenue of her works: artistic, ideological, and historical. Currently, Austen's works are one of the most written-about and debated oeuvres in the academy. Furthermore, a Janeite fan culture has grown up around Austen, her works and the various adaptations of them.

Source:
Wikipedia contributors, "Jane Austen," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jane Austen&oldid=177990122 (accessed December 15, 2007). [Read More...]

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