Jane Austen

(1775 - 1817)

“Arrange the great English novelists as one will,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1913, “it does not seem possible to bring them out in any order where she is not first, or second, or third, whoever her companions may be.” Jane Austen was born in 1775 in a town west of London known only for being the birthplace of the author of such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. She wrote six novels before her death at age forty-one. Decades later, her oldest sister burned most of Austen’s correspondence to keep her life out of the reach of gossipmongers, a plan that did not stop the writer from becoming a ubiquitous presence in pop culture.