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English novelist Jane Austen Jane Austen, a 19th-century engring likely derived from a portrait by her sister, Cassandra Austen, c. 1810. Jane Austen The life and legacy of the great 19th-century English writer who defined the novel of manners. Written by Brian C. Southam Publisher, Athlone Press, London. Author of Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts; Tennyson; and others. Brian C. Southam Fact-checked by Britannica Editors Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they he extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Britannica Editors Last updated Dec. 16, 2025 •History Top Questions How did Jane Austen influence literature?

Jane Austen influenced literature through her skillfully told and beautifully structured novels centering on young women who voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage. Austen’s works, which include such timeless classics as Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), focus on easily recognizable aspects of life, on character and personality, and on the tensions between her heroines and their society. They also realistically treat issues of social class, gender, and power. These aspects make her novels relate more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

How did Jane Austen die?

Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, at age 41. Before her death, she believed that her declining health was the result of bile, a fluid secreted by the liver. However, her symptoms (which included fever, rheumatism, and skin lesions) he led modern medical experts to propose that she had Addison disease, Hodgkin disease, or lupus.

Did Jane Austen marry?

No, Jane Austen never married. Scholars think that in 1802 she agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a family from Austen’s native Hampshire, England, but the next morning she changed her mind. There are also a number of stories connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon after. Since Austen’s novels are deeply concerned with love and marriage, it is highly likely that their author understood the experience of love and broken relationships.

How many siblings did Jane Austen he?

Jane Austen (born in Steventon, Hampshire, England, in 1775) had seven siblings. The children in her family were, in order of birth: James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Francis, Jane, and Charles.

What did Jane Austen accomplish?

English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) wrote about unremarkable people in unremarkable situations of everyday life, and yet she shaped such material into remarkable works of art. The economy, precision, and wit of her prose style; the shrewd, amused sympathy expressed toward her characters; and the skillfulness of her characterization and storytelling continue to enchant readers. Her novels include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey (1817).

What was Jane Austen’s family like?

Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra. Their father, George Austen, was an Anglican rector and a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. Their mother, Cassandra Austen (née Leigh), was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting. See Jane Austen’s family to learn more.

What did Jane Austen write?

Jane Austen is known for six novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (both 1817). In them, she created vivid fictional worlds, drawing much of her material from the circumscribed world of English country gentlefolk that she knew.

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Jane Austen (born December 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire, England—died July 18, 1817, Winchester, Hampshire) was an English writer who first ge the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. She published four novels during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). In these and in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (published together posthumously, 1817), she vividly depicted English middle-class life during the early 19th century. Her works defined the era’s novel of manners, but they also became timeless classics that remained critical and popular successes for more than two centuries after her death. These works reflect her enduring legacy.

Early life and family Everything We Know and Love About Jane AustenIt is a truth universally acknowledged...See all videos for this article

Jane Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon, England, where her father, George Austen, was rector of the local Anglican parish. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight—six boys and two girls. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra; neither Jane nor Cassandra married. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. Their mother, Cassandra (née Leigh), was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting.

Jane Austen’s lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. Moreover, her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. It was this world—of the minor landed gentry and the country clergy, in the village, the neighborhood, and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to London—that she was to use in the settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels. For more about her family and upbringing, see Jane Austen’s family.

Jane Austen's family A chart outlining the immediate family of novelist Jane Austen, showing her parents and siblings. Early writings and experiences with love and marriage

Austen’s earliest known writings date from about 1787, and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks: Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third. These contain plays, verses, short novels, and other prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms, notably the genres of the sentimental novel and sentimental comedy. Her passage to a more serious view of life from the exuberant high spirits and extragances of her earliest writings is evident in Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel (a novel told through letters) written about 1793–94 (and not published until 1871). Its portrait of a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction is, in effect, a study of frustration and of woman’s fate in a society that has no use for her talents.

In 1802 it seems likely that Austen agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family, but the next morning changed her mind. There are also a number of mutually contradictory stories connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon after. Since Austen’s novels are so deeply concerned with love and marriage, there is some point in attempting to establish the facts of these relationships. Unfortunately, the evidence is unsatisfactory and incomplete. Cassandra Austen was a jealous guardian of her sister’s private life, and after Jane’s death she censored the surviving letters, destroying many and cutting up others. Only 160 out of thousands of Jane Austen’s letters survive. But her own novels provide indisputable evidence that their author understood the experience of love and of love disappointed.

Britannica Quiz Novels and Novelists Quiz Publishing disappointments and life upheals

The earliest of Austen’s novels published during her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility, was begun about 1795 as a novel-in-letters called Elinor and Marianne, after its heroines. Between October 1796 and August 1797 Austen completed the first version of Pride and Prejudice, then called First Impressions. In 1797 her father wrote to offer it to a London publisher for publication, but the offer was declined. Northanger Abbey, the last of Austen’s early novels, was written about 1798 or 1799, probably under the title Susan. In 1803 the manuscript of Susan was sold to the publisher Richard Crosby for £10. He took it for immediate publication, but, although it was advertised, unaccountably it never appeared.

Up to this time the tenor of life at Steventon rectory had been propitious for Austen’s growth as a novelist. This stable environment ended in 1801, however, when George Austen, then age 70, retired to Bath with his wife and daughters. For eight years Jane had to put up with a succession of temporary lodgings or visits to relatives, in Bath, London, Clifton, Warwickshire, and, finally, Southampton, where Jane, her mother, and her sister lived from 1805 to 1809. In 1804 her dearest friend, Mrs. Anne Lefroy, died suddenly, and in January 1805 her father died in Bath. In the midst of this upheal, Austen began writing The Watsons in 1804 but soon abandoned it.

Access for the whole family! Bundle Britannica Premium and Kids for the ultimate resource destination. Subscribe Move to Chawton and publishing success Jane Austen's houseThe house in which Jane Austen lived from 1809 to 1817, Chawton, England.

Eventually, in 1809, Austen’s brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a large cottage in the village of Chawton, within his Hampshire estate, not far from Steventon. The prospect of settling at Chawton had already given Austen a renewed sense of purpose, and she began to prepare Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication. She was encouraged by her brother Henry, who acted as go-between with her publishers. She was probably also prompted by her need for money. Two years later Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which came out, anonymously, in November 1811. Both of the leading reviews, the Critical Review and the Quarterly Review, welcomed its blend of instruction and amusement.

Meanwhile, in 1811 Austen had begun Mansfield Park, which was finished in 1813 and published in 1814. By then she was an established (though anonymous) author; Egerton had published Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, and later that year there were second editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice seems to he been the fashionable novel of its season. Annabella Milbanke, a baronet’s daughter who was soon to marry the Romantic poet Lord Byron, called it “a very superior work” and the “most probable fiction” she had ever read. Between January 1814 and March 1815 Austen wrote Emma, which appeared in December 1815. In 1816 there was a second edition of Mansfield Park, published, like Emma, by Lord Byron’s publisher, John Murray. Persuasion (written August 1815–August 1816) was published posthumously, with Northanger Abbey, in December 1817.

The years after 1811 seem to he been the most rewarding of her life. She had the satisfaction of seeing her work in print and well reviewed and of knowing that the novels were widely read. They were so much enjoyed by the British prince regent (later King George IV) that he had a set in each of his residences, and Emma, at a discreet royal command, was “respectfully dedicated” to him. The reviewers praised the novels for their morality and entertainment, admired the character drawing, and welcomed the domestic realism as a refreshing change from the romantic melodrama then in vogue.

Unfinished works and death

For the last 18 months of her life, Austen was busy writing. Early in 1816, at the onset of her fatal illness, she set down the burlesque Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters (first published in 1871). Until August 1816 she was occupied with Persuasion, and she looked again at the manuscript of Susan (Northanger Abbey).

In January 1817 she began Sanditon, a robust and self-mocking satire on health resorts and invalidism. This novel remained unfinished because of Austen’s declining health. She supposed that she was suffering from bile, a fluid secreted by the liver. But her symptoms, which included fever, rheumatism, and skin lesions, he led to the modern clinical assessment that she had Addison disease. However, other medical experts he proposed that she had lupus or Hodgkin disease. Her condition fluctuated, but in April she made her will, and in May she was taken to Winchester to be under the care of an expert surgeon. She died on July 18, and six days later she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Austen’s authorship was announced to the world at large by her brother Henry, who supervised the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. There was no recognition at the time that Regency England had lost its keenest observer and sharpest analyst; no understanding that a miniaturist (as she maintained that she was and as she was then seen), a “merely domestic” novelist, could be seriously concerned with the nature of society and the quality of its culture; no grasp of Jane Austen as a historian of the emergence of Regency society into the modern world.

Quick Facts Born: December 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire, England Died: July 18, 1817, Winchester, Hampshire (aged 41) Notable Works: “Emma” “Lady Susan” “Mansfield Park” “Northanger Abbey” “Persuasion” “Pride and Prejudice” “Sense and Sensibility” See all related content

During Austen’s lifetime there had been a solitary response in any way adequate to the nature of her achievement: Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, where he hailed this “nameless author” as a masterful exponent of “the modern novel” in the new realist tradition. After her death, there was for long only one significant essay, the review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in the Quarterly for January 1821 by the theologian Richard Whately. Together, Scott’s and Whately’s essays provided the foundation for serious criticism of Jane Austen: their insights were appropriated by critics throughout the 19th century.