Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was born on 16 December 1775 at the rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh. Her father was a scholarly, well-read clergyman who encouraged his children’s literary pursuits; her mother came from a family with connections to the minor aristocracy. Jane was exceptionally close to her sister Cassandra, who remained her most intimate confidante throughout her life — and who, after Jane’s death, destroyed much of their correspondence, leaving biographers to fill the silences.

Life and Career

Austen’s life was outwardly uneventful — she never married, never travelled abroad, never held any position — but her inner world was rich and her observation of the social world around her was ferocious. She began writing as a teenager, producing the juvenilia (including Love and Freindship and The History of England) that already display her characteristic irony. The first drafts of three of her major novels were written in the late 1790s: Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility), First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice), and Susan (later Northanger Abbey).

Her father attempted to sell First Impressions to the publisher Thomas Cadell in 1797; it was rejected sight unseen. The family moved to Bath in 1801, a period Austen apparently found uncongenial. After her father’s death in 1805, she, Cassandra, and their mother lived in reduced circumstances in Southampton before settling in 1809 in a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, provided by her brother Edward. Chawton was decisive: it gave Austen the stability and privacy she needed, and within two years she had revised Sense and Sensibility for publication.

Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, published at the author’s financial risk by Thomas Egerton, and identified on the title page only as being “By a Lady.” Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813 and was an immediate success. Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815, dedicated to the Prince Regent at his own request) consolidated her reputation among discerning readers, though her readership remained modest by the standards of popular novelists like Walter Scott, who admired her greatly in private.

Austen began to suffer from ill health in 1816 — the nature of her illness remains debated; Addison’s disease and Hodgkin’s lymphoma are the leading candidates. She completed Persuasion in 1816 and began Sanditon in early 1817 but was forced to stop. She died on 18 July 1817 in Winchester, where she had gone to seek medical treatment, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in December 1817, with a biographical notice by her brother Henry that revealed her authorship for the first time.

Major Works and Themes

Austen’s subject is the marriage market of the English gentry — the intricate social negotiations by which young women of modest means and good family attempt to secure husbands of adequate fortune and character. Within this apparently narrow canvas she achieves an extraordinary depth of moral and psychological insight. Her novels are comedies of manners in which irony is the primary instrument of moral judgement; her heroines must learn to see clearly — to distinguish genuine worth from its imitations — before they can achieve happiness.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the most beloved English novel. Elizabeth Bennet’s misjudgement of Darcy and her gradual recognition of her own prejudice constitute a comedy of errors that is also a profound study of the relationship between self-knowledge and moral growth. The novel’s opening sentence — “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” — may be the most famous in English fiction.

Emma (1816) is Austen’s most technically accomplished novel: a study of self-deception in which the heroine, Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” spends the entire book misreading the people around her while the reader gradually perceives what Emma cannot. It is Austen’s most structurally complex work, and many critics consider it her masterpiece.

Persuasion (1817) is the most emotionally intense of the novels, an autumnal story of second chances in which Anne Elliot, who was persuaded eight years earlier to reject Captain Wentworth, is given an opportunity to correct the greatest mistake of her life. The letter Wentworth writes to Anne — “You pierce my soul” — is one of the great moments in English literature.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Austen’s reputation has undergone an extraordinary transformation. In her lifetime she was known to a small circle of admirers; by the mid-Victorian period she was a cult figure among the literary elite (the “Janeites”); by the twentieth century she was established as one of the greatest English novelists of any period. F.R. Leavis placed her at the head of “the great tradition” of English fiction, ahead of George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.

Her influence is pervasive: the English novel of domestic life from George Eliot through E.M. Forster to contemporary fiction is unimaginable without her. She has been adapted for film and television more often than any English author except Shakespeare.

Key Works

• Sense and Sensibility (1811)
• Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Mansfield Park (1814)
• Emma (1815)
• Northanger Abbey (1817, posthumous)
• Persuasion (1817, posthumous)

Collecting Austen

Jane Austen first editions are among the rarest and most valuable items in English literature. Because all six novels were published in small editions (probably 750–2,000 copies each), because they were published anonymously (“By a Lady” or “By the Author of Pride and Prejudice”), and because they were read to pieces by generations of readers, surviving copies in good condition are extraordinarily scarce.

Pride and Prejudice (1813, T. Egerton, London, three volumes) is the supreme Austen collectible. The first edition was published in boards with printed paper labels. Complete three-volume sets in the original boards are of legendary rarity — perhaps fewer than a dozen survive — and have sold for $100,000–$300,000 at auction. Even single volumes from the set command substantial prices.

Sense and Sensibility (1811, T. Egerton, three volumes) is the first published novel. First edition copies in original boards are even rarer than Pride and Prejudice; the few that have surfaced at auction in the past century have sold for comparable sums.

Emma (1816, John Murray, three volumes) was published by the most prestigious house in London, in an edition of approximately 2,000 copies. First editions in boards with the original paper labels are rare and valuable, typically bringing $30,000–$100,000.

The posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818, Murray, four volumes — two per novel) are the most accessible Austen first editions, though “accessible” is relative; fine sets bring $20,000–$60,000.

Austen autograph material is of the utmost rarity. Only three letters in her hand are known to have appeared at auction in the past fifty years. Manuscript fragments are held principally by the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Morgan Library. Any Austen autograph item that reached the market would be a major event.

For most collectors, the earliest obtainable editions are the Richard Bentley “Standard Novels” reprints of the 1830s or the handsome illustrated editions of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, particularly the Hugh Thomson-illustrated editions published by Macmillan in the 1890s, which are collected in their own right and bring $200–$1,000.