The Life of Jane Austen

    Hi, everyone, and welcome back to my blog! If you read my last blog post, you already know that I love to read. The books I usually read are English literature classics, and my favourite authors lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Today, I will write about one of my favourite authors, Jane Austen. By the end of this post, I hope you will be just as excited as I am about reading her novels.

https://www.freeimages.com/photo/portrait-of-jane-austen-1890759

Here is the source that I used for my research: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Austen

    Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a village in Hampshire, England. She was the seventh child and second daughter to Reverend George Austen, rector of Steventon and Cassandra Austen, née Leigh. Her only sister, Cassandra (who shared their mother's name), was her closest companion throughout her life.

http://www.lifeafterlondon.com/hampshire-why-move-to-hampshire/

    The Austen family was very spirited and affectionate, which provided the perfect context for Jane Austen to develop her writing abilities. She used her surroundings in her novels. The minor landed gentry (gentlemen owning land), the country clergy, the village, the neighbourhood, and life in a country town, sprinkled with her occasional visits to Bath or London, all inspired in some way or another either the settings or characters in her works.

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=chawton

    A few years after her father's death, one of her brothers managed to help Jane, her sister and her mother move into a cottage in the village of Chawton, close to Steventon, which was part of his estate. Moving back to her roots helped motivate the young author to pursue her career. She reworked her first versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility to ready them for publication. After the publication of her third novel, Austen was a well-established author, even if she remained anonymous.

https://www.pexels.com/search/jane%20austen/

    She passed away on July 18, 1817, and was buried six days later in Winchester Cathedral. Earlier that year, her health had started declining, but she thought it was bile. With the help of modern clinical assessments, doctors think she might have had Addison's disease, an uncommon disease which refers to the body not producing enough hormones. Her two last novels were published posthumously with one of her brothers supervising publication, and he was the one who revealed her identity to the world.

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=winchester%20cathedral

My opinion

    I already knew a little about Jane Austen's life since she is one of my favourite authors. I agree with the author when he says that she managed to depict English middle-class life during the early nineteenth century very well. Although I have no idea how people from the middle class lived then, I have read many novels from that time, so I have a general idea. The way that Austen described how her characters lived in her novels made me feel as if I was right there with them. Also, I have to agree when the author declares Austen's novels to be timeless classics. People have read her novels for over two hundred years, and I believe people will still read them two hundred years from now. Her novels also gave me an insight into what proper manners were at that time and helped the reader understand what was acceptable for people of higher rank wasn't always to citizens belonging to the middle class. From her works, like the author of the source mentioned, we can tell that Jane Austen was a strong-minded woman who knew her own mind, which wasn't always acceptable for females of that era. Finally, I need to agree with the source's author that even if Austen never married, she must have known what it was like to love and to have a disappointed love. All of her novels prove this fact since love is a significant theme in each of her novels.

Question

Before concluding this post, I would like to ask you a question: What were Jane Austen's three early novels (meaning which three did she write before becoming a published author) and how are they different from the others?

The answer to this question can be found in the link I provided to the source of the research.