Jane Austen
Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was a British novelist whose realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely-read and best-loved writers in British literature. Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family located socially and economically on the lower fringes of English gentry. She was educated largely at home by her father and older brothers and through her own reading. The strong and steadfast material, intellectual, and psychological support of her parents and siblings was critical to Austen's development as an artist and her eventual professional success. Austen's apprenticeship as a writer lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she wrote and revised three major novels and began a fourth. With the well-received publication of her novels Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815), Austen became a professional writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and began writing a third (eventually titled Sanditon), but died before they could be published. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were issued after her death in 1817, while Sanditon remained uncompleted. Austen's works critiqued the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and were part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Austen's plots, although fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her novels are concerned with morality and with social conventions. During her own lifetime, Austen's works brought her little fame and only a few positive reviews. Her novels continued to be admired by the literary elite during the mid-nineteenth century. However, with the publication of her nephew's Memoir of the Life of Jane Austen, her works became visible to a wider public. By the 1940s, Austen was firmly ensconced in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century has seen a proliferation of Austen scholarship, exploring every avenue of her works: artistic, ideological, and historical. Currently, Austen's works are one of the most written-about and debated in the academy.
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