Jane Austen Biography Quotes 61 Report mistakes

61 Quotes
Occup.	Writer
From	United Kingdom
Born	December 16, 1775
Died	July 28, 1817
Aged	41 years

Early Life and Family
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the rectory at Steventon, Hampshire, into a large and lively clerical family at the lower edge of the landed gentry. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, served as rector of Steventon and provided a home full of books and conversation. Her mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, came from an old Oxford-connected family and contributed wit and verse to the household culture. Jane was the second daughter and seventh of eight children. Her beloved elder sister, Cassandra, was her closest confidante throughout life; her brothers James, George, Edward, Henry, Frank, and Charles each left distinct marks on the family story. Edward was adopted by wealthy relatives, the Knights, an arrangement that would later secure the Chawton cottage for his mother and sisters; Henry became a banker and acted for a time as Jane's business agent; Frank and Charles pursued naval careers that would feed her knowledge of maritime life.

Education and Reading
Her formal schooling was brief but formative. She and Cassandra spent short periods at schools in Oxford and later Reading, but most of Jane's education took place at home. The Steventon rectory contained a well-stocked library, and her father encouraged wide reading. She absorbed novels, history, poetry, drama, and conduct literature, developing a sharp ear for rhetoric and a skeptical eye for social pretensions. Amateur theatricals staged by the family and neighboring friends cultivated her sense of dialogue and comic timing. She learned the piano and needlework, wrote verses for family amusement, and began to craft stories that mirrored and teased the conversational rituals around her.

Steventon Apprenticeship and Juvenilia
By her teens Austen was writing with assurance. The notebooks now called her juvenilia include parodies, burlesques, and experiments such as Love and Freindship and the novella Lady Susan, a coolly ironic tale of an unscrupulous widow. During the mid-1790s she drafted early versions of the novels that would make her name: Elinor and Marianne, first in epistolary form, and First Impressions, which she would later revise as Pride and Prejudice. These years also held emotional episodes, including a brief attachment to Tom Lefroy, a young Irishman visiting relatives nearby, remembered in later family accounts as a youthful flirtation that came to nothing. Marriage prospects did arise; in 1802 she accepted, then quickly withdrew from, a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, a family friend. Her choice to remain single preserved her time and independence for writing, though it also meant reliance on family support.

Bath, Loss, and Interrupted Work
In 1801 the Austens left Steventon for the fashionable spa town of Bath. The move, undertaken when Reverend Austen retired from his living, altered Jane's routines. Though she observed Bath society with her customary acuity, her fiction faltered amid the disruption. She continued to revise and sell work, including the manuscript of a novel called Susan to a publisher, but saw it languish unpublished. Family losses compounded uncertainty. Her father died in 1805, reducing the women of the household, Cassandra, their mother, and Jane, to modest means and a sequence of temporary lodgings. The unsettled Bath and Southampton years saw her begin The Watsons and set it aside, an interruption that marks the difficult middle of her life.

Southampton and Chawton: Return to Fiction
In 1809 stability returned when Edward Knight offered his mother and sisters a cottage on his Chawton estate in Hampshire. The move transformed Jane Austen's working life. In Chawton's quiet rooms, supported by the companionship of Cassandra and the loyal presence of their friend Martha Lloyd, she returned to drafts left dormant and wrote with renewed purpose. Family recollections describe her composing at a small table and guarding her privacy in a bustling household. Brothers visited from sea or business; Henry assisted with negotiations; nieces, including Fanny Knight, wrote to her seeking counsel on matters of feeling, letters that sharpened her sense of courtship and prudence. The calm of Chawton allowed sustained revision and steady output.

Publication and Anonymity
Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, published by Thomas Egerton and advertised as "By a Lady". Its success encouraged further work. Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, a revision of her earlier First Impressions, and quickly became popular for its wit and the interplay between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Mansfield Park came in 1814, a more sober novel of duty and income, also with Egerton. Emma was published in 1815 by John Murray, a prominent London house; though Austen famously protested that her heroine was the sort of person only she might much like, the novel deepened her study of social error and self-knowledge. Throughout, she maintained anonymity, a choice shaped by convention and personal preference. Her brother Henry managed many dealings with publishers, and in 1815 she was invited by James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, to dedicate Emma to the Regent, a request she could not refuse despite private reservations.

While living authorship remained veiled, she tracked her readership closely, noting responses among friends and family. She recovered the rights to Susan, retitled Northanger Abbey, a playful satire on gothic conventions rooted in her observations of Bath. In her final years she completed Persuasion, a poignant chronicle of constancy and second chances. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion would appear only after her death, edited and introduced by Henry.

The Craft: Themes, Style, and Observations
Austen's fiction operates within the compass of the provincial gentry, yet its reach is expansive. She concentrates on courtship, property, and manners because these structures governed women's prospects, including her own. The moral economies of her plots turn on choices about money, marriage, and sincerity, tested in a society of surveillance and talk. Her style refines free indirect discourse, blending narrator and character consciousness to expose self-deception without blunt authorial intrusion. Irony is both her scalpel and her shield: it allows critique while gratifying decorum. She deploys letters, conversations, and silences to dramatize how people misread each other and themselves.

Her family circle furnished insight without dictating content. The naval careers of Frank and Charles inform the maritime settings of Mansfield Park and the social textures of Persuasion. The banking ventures and subsequent reversals experienced by Henry inform her attention to income, risk, and speculation. Exchanges with her niece Fanny Knight reveal a mentor who prized steadiness of judgment over enchantment by charm. Friends such as Martha Lloyd shared daily life and household economies that sharpened her depiction of women's labor across drawing rooms and kitchens. Although she seldom writes outward politics, the wartime and Regency contexts shadow her pages, pressing on prices, patronage, and the movement of men and fortunes.

Health, Last Years, and Posthumous Publications
Around 1816 Austen's health began to fail. She continued to write, revising Persuasion's moving conclusion and starting a new, unfinished novel later known as Sanditon, whose brisk seaside setting and commercial energies hint at fresh directions. She also saw Northanger Abbey's rights returned after long delay. Symptoms of fatigue and pain gradually limited her work. In the spring of 1817 she and Cassandra went to Winchester seeking medical help. Jane died there on 18 July 1817, aged 41. The precise illness remains uncertain; modern speculation has proposed Addison's disease, Hodgkin lymphoma, or related conditions. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where a monument praises her character and intellect but does not name her as a novelist.

In December 1817, thanks to Henry's efforts, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together with a biographical notice that, for the first time, publicly identified the author. The edition secured her reputation beyond family and friends. Unfinished manuscripts such as The Watsons and Sanditon, and the earlier novella Lady Susan, would be printed later, broadening the view of her range.

Reception and Legacy
During her lifetime Austen enjoyed sales and admiration, but her fame remained circumscribed by anonymity and modest print runs. After her death, family guardianship shaped her image. James Edward Austen-Leigh, the son of her eldest brother James, published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, a gently protective portrait that preserved memories by Cassandra and others while omitting much that was private; Cassandra herself had destroyed many of Jane's letters, a loss scholars still reckon with. In the later 19th and 20th centuries, critics recognized the sophistication of her narrative technique and her sustained moral imagination. Her works proved durable on stage and screen, and their protagonists became fixtures of the cultural imagination.

Yet the center of her achievement remains the balance she strikes between comedy and conscience, between the pleasures of conversation and the pressure of circumstance. From the rectory at Steventon to the cottage at Chawton, from the Bath assemblies to the quiet close of Winchester, Jane Austen lived within a close-knit family, sustained by Cassandra, encouraged by brothers such as Henry and Edward, and enlivened by friends like Martha Lloyd. Within that circle she forged novels that made the local luminous, drew out the drama of everyday choices, and charted with rare steadiness the education of the heart.

Our collection contains 61 quotes who is written by Jane, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Friendship.

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