Dr Lizzie Rogers answers questions about the author and the social conventions of the world in which she lived and wrote
INTERVIEW: LAUREN GOOD
Q: What do we know about Jane Austen’s life?
A: Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh of eight children born to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. The family lived in Hampshire, where George was a cleric, and Austen spent the first two to three decades of her life there. Although she and her sister, Cassandra, went to school for a while, most of their education took place at home. After her father retired in 1800, Austen spent some time in Bath, but after her father’s death in 1805 until 1809, she, her mother, sister, and their friend Martha Lloyd were forced to live off the kindness of relatives, since they had little income of their own.
In 1809, Austen’s brother, Edward, offered them a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire – now Jane Austen’s House Museum – and it was there that she edited a lot of her early writing, including early versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Austen started publishing her work in 1811, with Sense and Sensibility being her first novel, but all her works were published anonymously, initially as “By a Lady” and then as “the author of [previous book]”. Sadly, Jane’s health started to decline, and she died on 18 July 1817, in Winchester, at the age of 41; she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Q: What was the Austen family’s position in Regency society?
A: Austen and her family were part of what is often referred to as the ‘pseudo-gentry’. While they had connections to wealthier families and established gentry, their own financial status was sometimes unstable. Austen’s brother Edward was adopted by a wealthy childless couple, the Knights, who owned the Chawton estate in Hampshire, and the two sisters didn’t have large marriage dowries, which were important during the Regency period. So, although the family wasn’t impoverished, money was occasionally a concern. But Austen enjoyed an artistically and culturally rich life, with access to her father’s extensive library of over 300 books, and she and her siblings were encouraged to read widely. Her early writings, known as her juvenilia, offer an interesting reflection of the society in which she mixed, with its expectations for women, concerns about financial stabi
