Jane Austen is one of the few novelists in world literature who is regarded as a "classic" and yet is widely read. As the contemporary novelist Fay Weldon puts it, for generations of students and the educated reading public in many countries, Austen's novels represent literature with a capital "L." On the other hand, Austen is the only novelist before Charles Dickens who still has a significant popular readership, and her fictional world--seen as an idyllic bygone time and place unlike, and preferable to, the present--has entered into popular literary culture.
Jane Austen was born into the rural professional middle class. Her father, George Austen (1731-1805), was a country clergyman at Steventon, a small village in the southern English county of Hampshire. He had risen by merit from a Kentish family in trade and the lower professions. Jane Austen's mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739-1827), was from a higher social rank, minor gentry related distantly to titled people, but once she married the Reverend Austen in 1764 she entered wholeheartedly and with humor into the domestic life and responsibilities of managing a household economy by no means luxurious, bearing eight children--six sons and two daughters.
