Press Association (21 February 2013). "Jane Austen stamps go on sale". The Guardian . Retrieved 18 September 2022. Gay, Penny. Jane Austen and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-65213-8. Jane Austen’s novels have acquired a following which is almost cult-like, and the many dramatisations of her work for screen, television and radio are testament to the books’ enduring popularity. One of her works was amongst the earliest transmissions to be heard on BBC radio: a reading of the proposal scene from Pride and Prejudice was broadcast on 15 January 1924. Todd, Janet. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-107-49470-1. Lynch, Deirdre Shauna. "Sequels". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 160–169

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775 in a harsh winter. Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that the newborn infant was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion". [9] The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane. [9] Church of St Nicholas in Steventon, as depicted in A Memoir of Jane Austen [10] Harding, D.W., "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Throughout her life Jane kept up regular correspondences with her sister Cassandra, her friends and her nieces and nephews. Although Cassandra removed anything deeply personal from these letters after Jane’s death, they tell of her attitude to her work, describing it as ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. This modest assessment was not shared by Sir Walter Scott or by the Prince Regent, who kept a set of her novels in each of his residences. George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were engaged, probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures. [20] He received the living of the Steventon parish from Thomas Knight, the wealthy husband of his second cousin. [21] They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by license, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. [22] Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death. [23]Scott, Walter. "Walter Scott, an unsigned review of Emma, Quarterly Review". Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812–1870. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X. 58–69.

Waldron, Mary. "Critical Response, early". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 83–91 Southam, B.C. "Criticism, 1870–1940". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 102–109 Austen letter to James Stannier Clarke, 15 November 1815; Clarke letter to Austen, 16 November 1815; Austen letter to John Murray, 23 November 1815, in Le Faye (1995), 296–298. Irene Collins estimates that when George Austen took up his duties as rector in 1764, Steventon comprised no more than about thirty families. [12]Miller, D.A. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-12387-X. Fergus, Jan. "Biography". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 3–11 It seems like a romance and at some level it is but only after normal intelligent and prudent women - young and old - use decorum and wise counsel added to commonsense. This like other books by the author is about how to live well and safe and be good and decent, sensible and honourable, prudent and not blinded by illusions, and find love and romance and marriage as well. Early on, a farmer, Robert Martin, is asking Harriet to marry him, only to have his proposition rejected, but because Emma Woodhouse had interfered and indeed transformed the expectations of the young protégée to the extent that later on, the latter would have so high hopes as to think and hope much beyond her possibilities – remember the Capital documentary, it was Impossible for the rich to consort with the poor or maybe better said, with those of ‘lower birth’, they could marry a destitute duchesse, but class counted for everything – and even think she could be the spouse of George Knightley.

The Prince Regent's admiration was by no means reciprocated. In a letter of 16 February 1813 to her friend Martha Lloyd, Austen says (referring to the Prince's wife, whom he treated notoriously badly) "I hate her Husband". [112] The character of this father, the rich owner of the home that is the title, unfolds, and there are confusion, test of virtue and character, and separations and misunderstandings. In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them to Southampton later that year. That autumn both girls were sent home after catching typhus, from which Jane Austen nearly died. [40] She was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle. [41] The curriculum probably included French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music and drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. [42] After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment". [43] Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. [167] Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, [168] who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. [169] The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. [161] The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. [161] In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works. [170]Southam, B.C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812–1870. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X. Meanwhile, in 1811 Austen had begun Mansfield Park, which was finished in 1813 and published in 1814. By then she was an established (though anonymous) author; Egerton had published Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, and later that year there were second editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice seems to have been the fashionable novel of its season. Between January 1814 and March 1815 she wrote Emma, which appeared in December 1815. In 1816 there was a second edition of Mansfield Park, published, like Emma, by Lord Byron’s publisher, John Murray. Persuasion (written August 1815–August 1816) was published posthumously, with Northanger Abbey, in December 1817. Doody agrees with Tomalin; see Doody, "Jane Austen, that disconcerting child", in Alexander and McMaster 2005, 105. Later, it's the young Sir Edward Denham, handsome, and flattering in his attentions to the visitor Miss Charlotte Haywood, who is subject of the author's scrutiny.