Born in 1775 in Steventon
Died in 1817 in Winchester
Notable works:
Pride and Prejudice (1813), novel
Emma (1815), novel
Persuasion (1818), novel
Jane Austen was an English woman of letters and was born in 1775 and died in 1817. The daughter of a rector of the Anglican Church and a member of English good society, she grew up surrounded by her six brothers and her sister. Her parents could not afford to offer her long years of studying, so her education came from her father, her brothers and the family library, which was particularly well-equipped and to which she had free access. She never married and lived her whole life with her family.
Her works often contain criticisms of the sentimental novels of the second half of the eighteenth century. Jane Austen denounces the woman’s dependence on her husband. The main novels published during her life are Sense and Sensibility (published anonymously in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815).
Genre: novel
1st edition: 1818
Themes: love, marriage, money, worldliness, women’s education, feminism
Persuasion was published posthumously in 1818. It tells the story of Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman who meets Frederick Wentworth by chance, a man whose proposal she had refused several years earlier. At the time, the young woman had let herself be persuaded that such a union was financially unwise. But now, Anne knows that she still loves Mr. Wentworth and she does not know what to do about it, even more so because familial matters trouble her life, which had been nicely organized until then.
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