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.
Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Though usually popular, her works were first published anonymously and brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.
Interested in reading Jane Austen's works? MRC has copies of the following:
- Sense and Sensibility
- Pride and Prejudice
- Emma
- Mansfield Park
- Northanger Abbey
- Persuasion
- Sanditon [completed posthumously by Anne Telscombe]
- The Watsons [fragment completed by John Coates]