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...