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Biography Jane Austen

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose realism, biting social commentary and masterful use of free speech, burlesque, and irony has earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writer in English literature.

Austen lived her entire live as part of a small anc lose-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry. She was educated primarily by her fathr 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 experimented with various literacy forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised major novels and began a fourth.

From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), sje achieved success as a published writer. She wrote additional novels, Norhanger Abbey and Persusion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are aprt of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Austen's plots, though fundamentally comix, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.

During Austen's lifetime, because she chose to publish anomymously, her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired only by mebers of the literacy elite. However, the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a wider public as an appealing personality and lindled popular interes in her works. By the 1940s, Austen was widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The Second half the the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which exploredmany aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical.