About the author
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, England. Her father, Reverend George Austen (1731-1805) was the rector at Steventon. In 1764, he married Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739-1827) who was from a patrician family. Jane Austen was the youngest of George and Cassandra's eight children - she had six brothers and one sister. The family was tightly-knit, and Jane was particularly close to her sister, Cassandra, and her brother, Henry, who would later became her literary agent. George and Cassandra Sr. sent Cassandra and Jane (who was only 8 years old at the time) to Oxford and Southampton to be educated. However, after Jane nearly died during an outbreak of typhus at their boarding school, both girls returned home to continue their studies. From 1785 to 1786, Jane and Cassandra attended the Reading Ladies Boarding School, where they studied French, spelling, needlework, music, and dancing. Economic hardships forced the girls to return home once again. Their father maintained a large library and indulged his daughters' curiosity with plenty of reading material. As a result, Jane and Cassandra continued to develop their literary talent despite their lack of a formal education. Beginning in her teen years, Austen wrote poems, stories, and comic pieces for the amusement of her family. She compiled several of the pieces she wrote between 1787 and 1793 into three bound notebooks, which scholars now refer to as Austen's "Juvenalia." Austen expressed an interest in drama and comedy; she often staged theatrical productions at home with her siblings. As she continued to experiment with writing, Austen became adept at parodying the sentimental and Gothic style of eighteenth-century novels. Among Jane Austen's early works is a comic novel with the deliberately misspelled title, "Love and Freindship," a satire of the "History of England," and "Lady Susan," an epistolary work. During this time, Austen also began to sketch out ideas for the novel that would later become Sense and Sensibility.
