Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.
- Austen's characters are unquestionably one key to her greatness. Her understanding of the human heart is forensic and also frosted with the necessary detachment that gives deeper meaning to her rendering of human frailty. In Emma, Jane Austen shows us the halting development of an adolescent girl from perky narcissism to something approaching empathy. -- Guardian - It is the cleverest of books. I especially love the dialogue -- every speech reveals the characters' obsessions and preoccupations, yet it remains perfectly natural...absolutely gripping. --Susannah Clarke