Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, in December 1775, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. She was educated informally — two years at a boarding school, mostly at home — and began writing at an early age, producing juvenilia that displayed the satirical intelligence and ear for social pretension that would characterize her mature work. Her family circumstances gave her unusual access to English middle-class life: her father had gentry connections but modest income; her brothers rose into the navy and the church; she observed, from the particular vantage of an unmarried woman of small means, the marriage market that organized the social world around her.

She completed three novels by the time she was twenty-two (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey), none of which were published for years. The family moved to Bath in 1801, a period that appears to have been creatively difficult — she produced little new fiction for several years. After her father's death in 1805 and subsequent moves to Southampton and Chawton, she returned to writing with renewed productivity. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 under the attribution "A Lady"; Pride and Prejudice in 1813; Mansfield Park in 1814; Emma in 1815. She died in July 1817, at forty-one, leaving Persuasion and Northanger Abbey to be published posthumously. The cause of her death is uncertain; Addison's disease is the current leading hypothesis.

Her novels work through an irony so precise that it requires attention to land correctly. The famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice — "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" — sounds like a straightforward statement and is actually its opposite: the "truth universally acknowledged" is the organizing assumption of the social world the novel is about to examine, and Austen's irony signals immediately that she is examining it rather than endorsing it. The whole machinery of the Bennet household — five daughters to marry, an entailed estate, a foolish mother and an exhausted father — is the material she works from.

The criticism of Austen that refuses to die is that her novels are too small: too domestic, too interested in drawing rooms and marriage proposals and social visits, not interested enough in the Napoleonic Wars happening simultaneously. The rebuttal is that the smallness is the point. Austen understood that the drawing room was where power operated in the lives of the women she was writing about: who you married determined your economic survival, your social position, your physical safety. The stakes of Emma or Persuasion are not small; they are calibrated to the limited range of action available to women in early nineteenth-century England, and that calibration is itself an argument about what that limitation costs.

Emma (1815) is generally considered her technical masterpiece: a protagonist who is wrong about almost everything important and is allowed, slowly, to become less wrong, without the novel ever being cruel to her. Persuasion (1817), the last completed novel, is the most romantic and the most melancholy: its heroine is twenty-seven, past the age when women in her social position were expected to be marriageable, and the novel is about what second chances cost and what they're worth.