Jane Austen was born at Steventon,Hampshire, in 1775, the daughter of a clergyman. At the age of 9 she was sent to school at Reading with her elder sister Cassandra, who was her lifelong friend and condifante, but she was largely tought by her father. She began to write for recreation while still in her teens. In 1801 the family moved to Bath, the scene of so many episodes in her books and, after the death of her father in 1805, to Southampton and then to the village of Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire. Here she lived uneventfully until May 1817, when the family moved to Winchester seeking skilled medical attention for her ill-health, but she died two months later. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Her best-known novels are Sense and Sensibility(1811), Pride and Prejudice(1813), Mansfield Park(1814), Emma(1816), and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818.

"there certainly are not many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them"