Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. She had only a few years of formal school. Her education came mostly from her father's library and from her family, who read aloud and staged plays at home. She began writing comic stories as a teenager.

She never married and depended on her family for money. After her father died in 1805, she, her mother and her sister Cassandra moved between relatives until her brother Edward gave them a cottage at Chawton in 1809. There she revised and published four novels in six years, none with her name on the title page.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) follows Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, who each judge the other too quickly and must correct their first impressions. Like all her novels, it shows how money, class and the marriage market limit the choices women can make, and it does this through irony, not lectures.

She fell ill in 1816 and died in Winchester in 1817, aged 41. After her death her brother Henry made her name public.