Jane Austen

Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children of a country rector in Hampshire. She was educated mostly at home, read everything in her father's library and by her teens was writing comic stories to entertain the family. In her early twenties she drafted the books that would become Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.

Getting them published was another matter. In 1797 her father offered First Impressions, the early Pride and Prejudice, to a London publisher; it was declined by return of post, unread. In 1803 she sold Susan for ten pounds to a publisher who never printed it. Then her father moved the family to Bath, and for most of a decade of upheaval, including his death in 1805, she wrote almost nothing.

In 1809 her brother gave the women of the family a cottage at Chawton. Working at a small table in the sitting room, she revised her old manuscripts and wrote new ones. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, By a Lady, at her own financial risk. Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma followed within four years.

She earned perhaps six hundred pounds from her books in her lifetime and was known as an author only to a small circle. She died in Winchester in 1817, aged 41, of an illness never firmly diagnosed. Her brother's note in the posthumous edition of Persuasion was the first time her name appeared in print.