Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, in England. Her father, an Anglican clergyman, encouraged her literary pursuits from a young age and by her mid-twenties, Austen had drafted three novels. Following the success of Sense and Sensibility in 1811, she went on to publish Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818. Despite her fondness for marriage plots–all six of her novels end in weddings–Austen never married, living with her mother and sister in the years leading up to her death. She died on July 18, 1817, in the city of Winchester. Over two centuries later, Austen’s novels remain beloved classics, and she is considered one of the foremost writers in English literary history. Claudia L. Johnson is Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s, editor of the Mansfield Park Norton Critical Edition, and author of many articles on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature.