Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, who spent her life in a small circle of family and neighbors and published four novels anonymously in her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared after her death at forty-one. Her subject is the marriage market of the English gentry, treated with an irony so exact that it has kept the books alive for two centuries. She drafted Pride and Prejudice in her early twenties under the title First Impressions and revised it for fifteen years before it was published in 1813.