Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, a Hampshire village where her father was the rector and the house was full of books, brothers and theatricals. The family performed plays in the barn and read novels aloud in the evenings, and Jane began writing as a teenager, filling notebooks with burlesques of the sentimental fiction she found ridiculous. Her sister Cassandra was her closest reader all her life; of the two sisters, neither ever married off the way their characters do.

Her first full novel, First Impressions, was offered to a publisher by her father in 1797 and refused without being read. She rewrote it as Pride and Prejudice and set it aside. In 1811 she paid for the printing of Sense and Sensibility herself, risking her own money, and the title page named no author at all: the book was simply by a Lady. It sold. She followed it with Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma, and reviews were kind, though the covers stayed anonymous.

She wrote in the sitting room of a cottage at Chawton, on small sheets of paper she could slip into a drawer at a knock, in the middle of family life and housekeeping. The world of her novels is the width of a village and three or four families, and within it she drew marriage, money, snobbery and self-deception more sharply than anyone before her. She never travelled further than Bath and London, and almost everything she needed was at the dinner table.

She died in Winchester in 1817, at forty-one, of an illness she had been living with for two years and never named in a letter. Her brother Henry, who had handled the publishing, added an announcement of her death to the last novels and finally put her name to them. It was the first time most readers learned who the Lady was.

The books have never been out of print since. Two hundred years on, Pride and Prejudice still sells by the hundred thousand copies every year, and her portrait has been on the ten-pound note. The outline of her plot, a proud man and a clever woman who slowly see each other clearly, remains the shape of half the stories told since, in books and on screens she could not have imagined.