Her life was, on the surface, uneventful and serene, but
her works reveal a mind of enormous vitality and scope, and
a powerful understanding of human behavior. Born on December
16, 1775, in the Hampshire village of Steventon where her
father was rector, she grew up in a lively, affectionate
family, who were (she recalled) "great novel-readers."
In rural Hampshire, among the minor landed gentry and
country clergy so perfectly portrayed in her work, she wrote
and anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814),
and Emma (1816).
She never married, and she ignored literary circles, ridiculing
the popular gothic novel and rejecting the tenets of
Romanticism. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
were published after her death on July 18, 1817.
Jane Austen described her own writing as a "little bit
of ivory" and maintained that "three or four families in a
country village is the very thing to work on."
These self-deprecatory remarks understate the universality of
her concerns and the loareness of her most prevalent theme:
the need for men and women to find self-awareness and identity
wile accepting, out of necessity, the powerlessnes and
dependency which society so often confers upon them.
Her flawless prose, written in the family's common
sitting room and hastily covered with a blotter when someone
entered, displays such shrewd wit, delicate irony,
and acconplished characterizations that jane Austen now
ranks as a master of the English novel.
