Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. She had only two years of boarding school and was largely self-taught from her father's library; as a girl she was already writing comic little stories to amuse her family. She never married; she once accepted a proposal from a wealthy young man and withdrew her consent the next morning. She spent most of her life in country towns, writing at a small table in the family sitting room and hiding the sheets when visitors came. The four novels published in her lifetime did not bear her name, only the words 'By a Lady'. She died at forty-one and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. With delicate, witty and ironic art she portrayed the marriages and daily lives of English country gentry, and she is acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists in English literature.