Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Jane Austen” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Jane Austen

(1775)

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, England (near Basingstoke). She was the seventh child (out of eight) and the second daughter (out of two), of the Rev. George Austen, 1731-1805 (the local rector, or Church of England clergyman), and his wife Cassandra, 1739-1827 (nee Leigh). In 1783, Jane and her older sister Cassandra went briefly to be taught by a Mrs. Cawley (the sister of one of their uncles), who lived first in Oxford and then moved to Southampton. In 1785-1786 Jane and Cassandra went to the Abbey boarding school in Reading, which apparently bore some resemblance to Mrs. Goddard’s casual school in Emma. This was Jane Austen’s only education outside her family. Within their family, the two girls learned drawing, to play the piano, etc. Jane Austen did a fair amount of reading, .of both the serious and the popular literature of the day. However decorous she later chose to be in her own novels, she- was very familiar with eighteenth century novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson, which were much less inhibited than those of the later (near-)Victorian era. She frequently reread Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, and also enjoyed the novels of Fanny Burney (a.k.a. Madame D’Arblay). She later got the title for Pride and Prejudice from a phrase in Burney’s Cecilia, and when Burney’s Camilla came out in 1796, one of the subscribers was Miss J. Austen, Steventon.

In 1782 and 1784, plays were staged by the Austen. family at Steventon rectory, and in 1787-1788 more elaborate productions were put on there under the influence of Jane’s sophisticated grown-up cousin Eliza de Feuillide (to whom Love and Freindship is dedicated)’. This throws an interesting light on Jane Austen’s apparent disapproval of such amateur theatricals in her novel Mansfield Park Jane Austen wrote her Juvenilia from 1787 to 1793; they include many humorous parodies of the literature of the day, such as Love and Friendship, and are collected in three manuscript volumes. They were originally written for the amusement of her family, and most of the pieces are dedicated ‘to one or another of her relatives or family friends Earlier versions of the novels eventually published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey were all begun and worked on from 1795 to 1799. In 1797, First Impressions/Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher by Jane Austen’s father, but the publisher declined to even look at the manuscript.