Born: December 16, 1775 | Died: July 18, 1817
Nationality: British | Genre: Classic Fiction, Romance, Social Commentary
Jane Austen was a pioneering English novelist whose sharp wit, steady irony, and clear-eyed view of everyday life reshaped how love and society were written about. In novels like Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, she set courtship and family dramas against the pressures of money, status, and reputation in Regency England. Her heroines think for themselves, test the limits of convention, and learn to balance feeling with judgment—turning domestic plots into lasting studies of character.
Born to a country clergyman in Steventon, Hampshire, Austen wrote from the rhythms of village life she knew well. She drafted stories from a young age, later revising them in Chawton, where most of her mature work took shape. Publishing anonymously (“By a Lady”), she saw Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815) into print; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously in 1818, when her authorship was publicly acknowledged. Austen’s elegant prose, sly humor, and early use of free indirect style helped modernize the novel, and her keen insight into choice, compromise, and self-knowledge keeps her work vividly alive today.
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart… Warmth and tenderness of heart… will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction, I am sure it will.
fromEmmabySilly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
fromEmmabyWhy not seize the pleasure at once?—How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
fromEmmabyHuman nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
fromEmmaby