Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, the seventh child of a country clergyman. She was educated mostly at home, in her father's library.

According to family tradition, she began a novel called First Impressions in October 1796 and finished it in August 1797, ten months later. She was 21. That manuscript would become Pride and Prejudice, but it took sixteen years to reach print.

On 1 November 1797 her father wrote to the London publisher Thomas Cadell, offering a manuscript novel in three volumes, "about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina". The letter came back with a curt line scrawled across the top: declined by return of post. Cadell had not read a page.

In 1803 another novel, Susan, was sold to the publisher Benjamin Crosby for £10, on the understanding it would come out soon. Six years went by with nothing. In 1809 she wrote to Crosby under a pseudonym, Mrs Ashton Dennis; he offered to sell the manuscript back for the same £10, money she didn't have. Her brother Henry bought it back in 1816. It was published after her death as Northanger Abbey.

In 1809 her brother Edward gave her, her mother and her sister a cottage at Chawton. There she revised Sense and Sensibility and, with Henry acting as her agent, offered it to the publisher Thomas Egerton. She published it on commission: she paid for printing and advertising, and Egerton took a cut of the sales. The title page said only "By a Lady". It was advertised on 30 October 1811. She was 35.

By 3 July 1813 every copy had sold and brought her £140. In the meantime Egerton had bought the copyright of Pride and Prejudice for £110. It came out on 28 January 1813, three volumes for 18 shillings, credited to "the Author of Sense and Sensibility". She was 37. Mansfield Park followed in 1814 and Emma in 1815, still without her name.

She rewrote a great deal. Sense and Sensibility began around 1795 as a novel in letters, Elinor and Marianne, was reworked in 1797, then revised again at Chawton in 1809 and 1810. Pride and Prejudice was "lop't and crop't", in her words, in 1811 and 1812, and changed title because another book of 1800 already had the first one.

Her tool was a travelling writing desk her father gave her when she was 19: a mahogany box that folds into a case, with a secret drawer. It is now at the British Library. At Chawton, visitors are still shown the small twelve-sided walnut table on which she is said to have written, in the middle of the household.

After Steventon the family lived in Bath, then in Southampton from 1806, before Chawton in 1809, her most productive years. She began Persuasion in 1815 and finished it the following year, as her health was failing.

In May 1817 she and her sister Cassandra moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. She died there on 18 July 1817, aged 41, and was buried in the cathedral. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey came out together in December 1817, with a notice by her brother Henry: the first time one of her books named her.