Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.
Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’ (1814)
Jane Austen, b. December 16, 1775, d. July 18, 1817
Born 250 years ago today, Jane Austen was an English writer who first presented the novel with ordinary people in everyday life, the English middle-class. Her most productive years were her last eight, these spent in Chawton Cottage, now known as Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, England. There, she wrote near a window on a small walnut table on a writing slope she’d received from her father. One of the most widely read writers in English literature, Austen wrote six novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815, stated on title page 1816) and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (published, together as a four volume set, posthumously, in 1817).
Austen was unwell by early 1816, but ignored the symptoms. Her decline was unmistakable by the middle of that year and she began a slow deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on the retrospective diagnosis (1964) of Zachary Cope (an English physician, surgeon, author, historian and poet) and list her cause of death as Addison’s disease. That said, her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Although she had several suitors, Austen never married.
Jane Austen died in Winchester on July 18, 1817. She was 41. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire. A small tablet was unveiled to her memory in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, on December 17th, 1967.
Photo credit:
Jane Austen; published by Richard Bentley, stipple engraving (published 1870), after Cassandra Austen’s
pencil and watercolour, circa 1810
National Portrait Gallery, UK: NPG Reference Collection: D13873
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