by Martina Capacci

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was the daughter of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh and had six brothers and a sister, Cassandra Elizabeth. Jane and Cassandra really loved each other.

In 1783 she was sent to Oxford with her sister, but, in the autumn, they both caught typhus and were sent back home; Jane nearly died. Since then Austen was home educated, until she attended boarding school from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls’ School. The sisters came back home before December 1786, because of the school fees, which were too high for the Austen family. After 1786 Jane never lived again in any other place but her family environment. The remainder of her education came from reading, under the guidance of her father, George and her brothers James and Henry. Jane was able to access to her father’s library and to the one of a family friend, Warren Hastings. These collections amounted to a large and varied library.

From the age of eleven, and maybe even earlier, Austen wrote poems and stories for her and her family’s enjoyment. Between 1787 and 1793 she wrote fair copies of twenty-nine early works known as the “Juvenilia”, composed by three volumes: “Volume the First”, “Volume the Second” and “Volume the Third”; in these works the details of daily life are exaggerated and common plot devices are parodied; they preserve 90.000 words she wrote during those years.

Thomas (Tom) Langlois Lefroy visited Steventon from December 1795 to January. Lefroy and Jane would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering and in her letters to her sister Cassandra, Austen stated she was clearly attracted to Lefroy, and so was he. Unfortunately, the Lefroy family intervened and sent Tom away from the Austen family, so Jane never saw him again and never fell in love again.

After the epistolary novel “Lady Susan” was finished, Austen began her full-length novel called “Elinor and Marianne”. In 1796 she started working on her second novel, “First Impressions” (now known as “Pride and Prejudice”), which was terminated in 1797, when Jane was only twenty-one. Her father George was extremely impressed by Jane’s works, so he contacted a publisher and asked for “First Impressions” to be published, but the offer was refused.

Between 1797 and 1798 Austen revised “Elinor and Marianne”. Without any of the original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as “Sense and Sensibility”.

After 1798 she started writing another novel, called “Susan” (now known as “Northanger Abbey”), which was a satire on the gothic novel. It was published only in 1816; Henry Austen first sold it to a publisher, but it was not published until the Austen family got the resources to buy the copyright.

In 1800 George Austen moved with his family to Bath, where he died in 1805. Edward, James, Henry and Francis Austen helped Jane, her sister Cassandra and her mother with the money, as, since after the death of George, the three of them had been in economic trouble.

In 1806 the three women moved to Southampton, in the house of Frank Austen, and in 1809 to Chawton, a small village in Hampshire, near Steventon, where Edward Austen let them live in a cottage of his own.

The Egerton Publisher published “Pride and Prejudice” in 1813.

In 1812 Jane started writing “Mansfield Park”, finished and published in 1814: it was a great success and all the copies were sold in six months.

In 1814 Jane started working on “Emma”, finished and published for the first time in 1815.

“Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey” were both published for the first time in 1817.

“Emma” is the last novel that was published when Austen was still alive.

In 1816 Jane was feeling unwell. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable; she began a slow, irregular deterioration, but she continued working in spite of her illness. She put down her pen on 18 March 1817. As her illness progressed, she found difficulty in walking and lacked energy; by April she was confined to bed, most probably because of a serious disease now known as Hodgkin lymphoma. In May, Cassandra and Henry brought their sister to Winchester for treatment, but nothing worked and Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41; Henry Austen arranged for her sister to be buried in Winchester Cathedral.