Jane Austen biography

Jane Austen’s birthday: 16 December

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at the rectory in Steventon, a small village in north Hampshire, where her father was the parish priest. She arrived later than her parents expected, in a winter so hard that she was baptised privately at home the next day. Her father wrote to a relation that the family had “another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion”, and so it proved.

Every December readers mark her birthday: December 2025 was the 250th anniversary, and 16 December 2026 is her 251st. Book clubs read her novels’ opening chapters aloud, Austen societies hold teas and readings, and many people simply start a reread. The house where she wrote at Chawton, now Jane Austen’s House museum, is the place most associated with her; check its own calendar for what it is planning this year.

Early writing: from the juvenilia to First Impressions

From about the age of eleven she wrote comic pieces to make her family laugh, later copied into three notebooks she called Volume the First, Second and Third: parodies of the sentimental novels of the day such as Love and Freindship (her own spelling). In her early twenties she drafted the first versions of three novels: Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility), First Impressions (1796–97, later Pride and Prejudice) and Susan (later Northanger Abbey).

Her father offered First Impressions to a London publisher in 1797, who turned it down without reading it. Susan was sold in 1803 for ten pounds to a publisher who never brought it out. It would be another eight years before anything she wrote reached print.

The six novels, and how they were published

At Chawton she revised her early drafts and wrote three new novels, working at a small table in the family sitting room. Henry acted as her agent. None of her books carried her name: Sense and Sensibility was published “By a Lady”, and each later title “By the Author of” the earlier ones.

When the first copies of Pride and Prejudice arrived she wrote to Cassandra, on 29 January 1813, “I have got my own darling Child from London.” Her advice to her niece Anna, who was writing a novel, describes her own method: “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” For which to read first, see our guide to Jane Austen’s novels, ranked and in order.

Her reputation spread quickly among readers in the know. The Prince Regent kept a set of her novels in each of his houses, and his librarian invited her to dedicate Emma to him, an invitation she could not refuse.

Illness and death in Winchester

Early in 1816 her health began to fail. She went on working, finishing Persuasion and starting a new novel, Sanditon, in January 1817, but stopped in March. The cause of her illness is still debated: Addison’s disease and Hodgkin’s lymphoma are the most often suggested, and no diagnosis has been proved.

In May 1817 Cassandra took her to Winchester to be near her physician, to lodgings in College Street. She died there early on 18 July 1817, aged 41, with her head on her sister’s lap. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral on 24 July. Her gravestone praises her sweetness of temper and her faith, and says nothing about her books.

Five months later, Henry’s memoir in the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion told the public who she was.