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Creator / Jane Austen

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Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English author who lived in the late 18th/early 19th century and wrote six novels between 1790 and 1817 before dying at the age of 41. Her books were published anonymously during her lifetime, but she is now one of the most famous authors in the English language.

Her novels are written with wit and frequent irony, and all follow a similar formula: gentlewoman sooner or later falls in love with man but can't marry him because he's engaged to someone else/he's in love with someone else/etc. Often there are cads to tempt her as well, but ultimately she ends up with the good guy who won't steal all her money or abandon her somewhere. There's far more variety among her heroines in terms of personality, though. She specialized in two types: Spirited Young Lady, the lively, witty, restless heroine who never fears to speak her mind (Elizabeth Bennet, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse); and the quiet, Stoic Woobie who rarely if ever speaks her mind since everyone misjudges her anyway (Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot).


Despite being nominally romance novels, and writing in a period that overlapped with Romanticism, Austen's works are not classified as Romantic-with-a-capital-R. Austen strikes a balance between Romanticism and Enlightenment - her happy endings are born of social harmony as well as warmth of feeling.




She ended at #70 in 100 Greatest Britons.

The novels, in order of publication:

Other work:


Appearances in other media:

Works by Jane Austen (other than those with their own page) contain examples of:

  • Accomplice by Inaction: In the unfinished The Watsons, the eldest brother Robert lets his sisters live in relative poverty, except the one he invites home.
  • Disinherited Child: Emma Watson is brought up by her wealthy aunt and she's openly acknowledged as her child and heiress. However, Emma's aunt is widowed and later re-marries, and then Emma has to return home to her much poorer family.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: An in-universe example with Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon:
    "With a perversity of judgement, which must be attributed to his not having by Nature a very strong head, the Graces, the Spirit, the Sagacity, and the Perseverance, of the Villain of the Story outweighed all his absurdities and all his Atrocities with Sir Edward. With him, such Conduct was Genius, Fire and Feeling. It interested and inflamed him; and he was always more anxious for its Success and mourned over its Discomfitures with more Tenderness than could ever have been contemplated by the Authors."
  • Fan Community Nicknames: Some of her fans call themselves "Janeites".
  • Good-Looking Privates: In The Watsons (fragment of a novel), Mary Edwards is courted by Captain Hunter. After a ball, her mother is not very satisfied that Mary had been dancing with military men only, and neglected their neighbours because of them. Particularly a certain son of a certain rich banker.
  • Massive Numbered Siblings:
    • Charlotte Heywood in Sanditon comes from a family of 14 children.
    • The Watsons from The Watsons are a large family: sisters Elizabeth, Penelope, Margaret and youngest Emma and brothers Richard and Sam.
  • Regency England: Regency England is the setting of her novels. It's always somewhat idealised version of it, focusing on pastoral idyll of the countryside, visits, balls and dances, dinner parties, garden parties and picnics. Her focus is the upper-middle class.
  • Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: In Sanditon, Mr. Parker treats the rival seaside town of Brinshore as one — he always finds faults with Brinshore and considers Sanditon vastly superior. It's very entertaining, considering how Sanditon and Brinshore are practically identical.
  • Spin-Off Cookbook: The Jane Austen Cookbook. It describes Jane Austen's interest in food, drawing upon both the novels and her letters. It has authentic recipes from late Georgian and Regency England, modernized for today's cooks.
  • Word of God: The futures of many of the characters, particularly secondary characters, are left unexplained in the novels. Fortunately for us, Austen had several nieces and nephews who were big fans of Aunt Jane's writing, and they recorded her answers to their questions:
    • According to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, Anne Steele never succeeded in catching Doctor; Kitty Bennet married a clergyman near Pemberley and her sister Mary married one of her uncle Philip’s clerks; the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave her nephew William Price was one pound; Mr Woodhouse died two years after Emma's marriage, and Emma and Mr Knightley settled in Donwell after his death; and the letters Frank Churchill placed before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word 'pardon'.
    • A later family biography (Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters) adds the claim that Jane Fairfax died nine or ten years after her wedding, but even the writers (a hundred years after Austen's death) weren't sure about the origins of that one.
    • According to Jane Austen: A Family Record, Austen's sister Cassandra revealed the basic plot of the unfinished The Watsons to one of their nieces—Mr Watson dies, forcing his daughters to move in with their sister-in-law and brother, Emma turns down a proposal from Lord Osborne, and tension abounds due to Lady Osborne's passion for Mr Howard and his interest in Emma. Emma and Mr Howard would eventually marry.


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