Austen 101. 10 facts about Jane Austen

Legions of fans around the world venerate Jane Austen and this social phenomenon has given birth to a noun: “ a Janeite”. George Saintsbury, a literary critic, invented the word “Janeite” as a way of referring to Jane Austen passionates. Don’t worry, it isn’t because you don’t proudly proclaim yourself as a Janeite that you can't read my article, But it is worth knowing why so many people do. Once you have already read Jane Austen’s work, it may be hard to take a fresh look on the world she describes. In order to do so, there is nothing better than to dive into Jane Austen’s life, the world she was born to, the changes it has undergone as well as anecdotes on her everyday life and the heritage she leaves us with. So here we go ! I’ve selected  10 facts on Jane Austen and made a special mention of Sense and Sensibility.  

1. Birth / It’s hard to know if Jane Austen took her time to join the world or if her mother made a mistake when calculating her birth date, but Jane Austen is born one month after the predicted date.*

  2.  Family /Jane Austen is the youngest among her six brothers and one sister.

  3. World context / The year Jane Austen is born, 1775, In Reims, the French king Louis XVI is crowned and Marie- Antoinette becomes queen. In Portsmouth, James cook comes back from his second trip on the HMS Resolution. In Boston, the American revolution begins.  

4. Love life / Jane Austen falls in love when she is twenty with Tom Lefroy; a nephew of her family’s friends. However, the two families don’t approve so Tom leaves and never sees jane again. She later receives a marriage proposal from another man she describes as plain . She firsts accepts but the next day refuses this proposal.

  5. Editors / Jane Austen’s portrait appeared for the first time on the 10 pound bill in 2017. Ironically, it is the exact sum she was paid for “Susan”, her first book that will never be published by the editor. None of her books actually become successful during her life.  

6. Characters brought to life / Jane Austen continued to imagine how the lives of her characters evolved long after she finished a novel. In A Memoir of Jane Austen, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote, “She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people.” For example, Anne Steele, Lucy’s silly and vulgar sister in Sense and Sensibility, did not catch Dr. Davies after all. 

 7.  Real names / The surnames of a number of Austen’s characters can be found within the prominent and wealthy Wentworth family of Yorkshire -- which also happens to intersect with Jane Austen’s own family tree. Her mother, Cassandra Austen, née Leigh, was the great-grandniece of the first Duke of Chandos and Cassandra Willoughby.  

8. No children but novels … / Jane Austen never got married or had children but thought of her novels as children. In letters to her sister, Jane described Pride and Prejudice (1813) as her “darling child” and wrote “I am never too busy to think of S & S (Sense and Sensibility). I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child”. This is an interesting analogy because, like pregnancy and childbirth, the creation of her novels was a long and laborious process.

  9. first and anonymous novel / Sense and sensibility focuses on the story of two girls, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who live the claustrophobic society of the Regency era. It is the author’s first book and was published anonymously, signed by the mention of “a lady”.  It wasn't considered "ladylike" for a woman to publish her work for money at that time, and Austen’s identity was only revealed by her brother, after her death.

 10. First titles / Sense and Sensibility was originally titled "Elinor and Marianne" and was composed of only letters between the two. Pride and Prejudice was originally titled "First Impressions," signed simply, "By the author of Sense and Sensibility." Additionally, the book she wrote when she was 14 was actually misspelled: "Love and Freindship."

 by Celestine

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