by Jane Austen

Born on Dec. 16, 1775, to Cassandra Leigh and George Austen, Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children. Educated at Oxford, her father was rector of Steventon, the small Hampshire village where Jane lived until 1801, when the family moved to Bath. Jane and her only sister, Cassandra, had several years of schooling away from home, but most of their education came from the family library (which held some 500 volumes, making the Austens a very bookish nineteenth-century family indeed). Though courted on a number of occasions, Jane remained unmarried. Her closest relationship was with Cassandra; the two sisters maintained an extensive correspondence and deep intimacy despite circumstances that pulled them apart (after their father died, the sisters often circulated among their brothers’ households). In 1808, both sisters moved with their mother to a cottage on the property of their brother Edward in Chawton, Hampshire. It was then that...