EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND

Dr Lizzie Rogers answers questions about the author and the social conventions of the world in which she lived and wrote

- Dr Lizzie Rogers

Q: What do we know about Jane Austen's life?

A: Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh of eight children born to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. The family lived in Hampshire, where George was a cleric, and Austen spent the first two to three decades of her life there. Although she and her sister, Cassandra, went to school for a while, most of their education took place at home. After her father retired in 1800, Austen spent some time in Bath, but after her father's death in 1805 until 1809, she, her mother, sister, and their friend Martha Lloyd were forced to live off the kindness of relatives, since they had little income of their own.

In 1809, Austen's brother, Edward, offered them a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire - now Jane Austen's House Museum - and it was there that she edited a lot of her early writing, including early versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Austen started publishing her work in 1811, with Sense and Sensibility being her first novel, but all her works were published anonymously, initially as "By a Lady" and then as "the author of [previous book]". Sadly, Jane's health started to decline, and she died on 18 July 1817, in Winchester, at the age of 41; she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Q: What was the Austen family's position in Regency society?