Austen died soon after the move and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.Īlthough the Bennets, on the surface, seem ruled by the mores of their society, the story proves that most of the family ill fit the expectations society would have for them. When Austen’s health began to fail, Cassandra moved with her to nearby Winchester, a larger city where medical help would be available. While living here Austen published four novels: Finally another brother, Edward, offered his mother and sisters the use of a house on his estate in Chawton. They lived for a time in Southampton with her brother Frank, a naval officer, and his wife and spent a good bit of their time traveling from relative to relative, a situation not uncommon for widows and spinsters in the early 19th century.

When her father died, the Austen sisters and their mother were financially dependent on Austen’s brothers. Her sister Cassandra was engaged to a man who died while on business in the Caribbean, and neither sister ever married.Īfter her father’s retirement, Austen moved with her family to Bath, a setting used in her novels. Austen apparently fell in love with a young man, Tom LeFroy, who visited the neighborhood for a time, but whose family sent for him to return home to Ireland when they became aware of his interest in Austen, the daughter of a poor, low-ranking clergyman. Although she began writing in childhood, her first novel was not published until 1811. The seventh of eight children, Jane was particularly close to her only sister Cassandra throughout her life. Jane Austen spent her childhood in the village of Steventon, where her father was the rector and her family active in village social life.

The title of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, suggests an age influenced by 18th-century rationalism and 19th-century Romanticism. The aristocracy viewed manners, living according to society’s strictures, as indicative of belonging to the coterie in a time when being ostracized by society was considered a fate worse than death. This era, dominated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Industrial Revolution, juxtaposed world-changing political events and technological innovations with the ostentatious, consciously fashionable world of the Prince Regent and the aristocracy bound by strict rules of social behavior. Bouts of insanity, now believed to have been caused by an illness and made worse by physicians and virtual imprisonment, made George III incapable of ruling, leading to the regency of his son and heir apparent, George, later to become King George IV on his father’s death. In her novels, Jane Austen fashions the quintessential picture of Regency England, the period from 1811–1820 in which Prince George served as Prince Regent to his father King George III.

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