Jane Austen

Jane Austen Biography (1775–1817) Novelist, born in Steventon, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, S England, UK, where her father was rector. She spent the first 25 years of her life there, and later lived in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. The fifth of a family of seven, she began writing for family amusement as a child. Love and Friendship (published 1922) dates from this period.

Her early published work satirized the sensational fiction of her time, and applied common sense to apparently melodramatic situations - a technique she later developed in evaluating ordinary human behaviour. Of her six great novels, four were published anonymously during her lifetime and two under her signature posthumously.

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