Portal:Jane Austen

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Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. (more...) Template:/box-footer

Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, though she had previously made a start on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Originally titled Susan, the novel was written approximately during 1798–99. It was revised by Austen for the press in 1803, and sold in the same year for £10 to a London bookseller, Crosby & Co., who decided against publishing. In 1817, the bookseller was content to sell it back to the novelist's brother, Henry Austen, for the exact sum — £10 — that he had paid for it at the beginning, not knowing that the writer was by then the author of four popular novels. The novel was further revised before being brought out posthumously in late December 1817 (1818 given on the title-page), as the first two volumes of a four-volume set with Persuasion.

Northanger Abbey is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head, by making her heroine a plain and undistinguished girl from a middle-class family, allowing the heroine to fall in love with the hero before he has a serious thought of her, and exposing the heroine's romantic fears and curiosities as groundless. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin speculates that Austen may have begun this book, which is more explicitly comic than her other works and contains many literary allusions that her parents and siblings would have enjoyed, as a family entertainment—a piece of lighthearted parody to be read aloud by the fireside. (more...)

Eliza Hancock (22 December 1761 - April 1813), then Eliza de Feuillide after her first marriage, to a French nobleman in 1781, and later Eliza Austen after her second marriage in 1797, was the cousin of novelist Jane Austen.

Fourteen years older than her sister Jane, Eliza was the daughter of George Austen’s sister Philadelphia, who had gone to India to marry Tysoe Saul Hancock in 1753.

With her glamorous personality, Eliza Hancock is believed to have been inspirational for a number of Austen's works, such as Love and Freindship (sic), Henry and Eliza, Lady Susan and Mansfield Park, and she may have been the model from whom the character of Mary Crawford is derived. (more...)

Coloured version of Jane Austen, c. 1873, author unknown

• ...that Jane Austen's novels increased dramatically in popularity after the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870?

• ... that Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility is a critique of Charlotte Turner Smith's novel of sensibility Celestina?

• ... that Jane Austen began writing her novel Pride and Prejudice (originally named First Impressions) after staying with her brother at Goodnestone Park, Kent, in 1796?

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Featured articles

• Reception history of Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice (1995 TV series)
• Pride & Prejudice (2005 film)

• Sense and Sensibility (film)
• Persuasion (1995 film)

Featured lists

• Timeline of Jane Austen

• List of accolades received by Sense and Sensibility (film)

Good articles

• Sense and Sensibility (2008 TV miniseries)
• Northanger Abbey (2007 film)

• Becoming Jane
• Jane Austen

• Promote Austen-related biographies to GA and FA status (such as the article on Austen herself)
• Promote Austen novels to GA or FA status (such as Sense and Sensibility)
• Clean-up all Austen character articles (such as Anne Elliot)

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