Jane Austen

I was born in 1775 at Steventon, a rector’s daughter with a lively household, a good library, and assemblies enough to observe how fortunes, tempers, and expectations arrange themselves in a country room. I began early—nonsense, burlesque, and small dramas for home performance—teaching myself how a faint blush or a careless remark might decide a life.

Removal to Bath unsettled me; my father died there, and we daughters learned again the arithmetic of reduced circumstances. At Manydown I once accepted a proposal at night and refused it with the morning light, preferring plain comfort in my own mind to an establishment without it. I never married.

Chawton, in 1809, restored quiet industry. I kept a small table near a door that creaked; I would not have it mended, for the warning let me slip my pages away. There I revised old manuscripts and sent them into the world—first Sense and Sensibility, then Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma—anonymously, “By a Lady.” I sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice outright and watched others profit more handsomely than its author. At the Prince Regent’s librarian’s urging, I dedicated Emma to His Royal Highness, though my feelings were not solicitous.

Ill-health pursued me to Winchester, where I died in 1817. Afterward, my family brought out Northanger Abbey and Persuasion; a small unfinished tale, later called Sanditon, remained a fragment. My sister Cassandra kept my best counsel—and destroyed many letters—so you must take the novels for what I wished to leave.