Who Was Jane Austen? Six Novels, Published Anonymously

Born in 1775 in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman, she had an unusually literate upbringing: her father kept a library of several hundred books and encouraged his daughters to use it, and the family wrote and performed plays. She began writing as a child, producing a set of parodies and burlesques now called the Juvenilia that are funnier and more savage than anything she published later. The family moved to Bath in 1801, a period during which she wrote almost nothing, and after her father's death in 1805 the women of the family lived in reduced circumstances until a brother provided a cottage at Chawton in 1809. Those last eight years produced everything. She never married, having accepted a proposal one evening in 1802 and withdrawn her acceptance the next morning, and she died in Winchester in 1817 of an illness variously diagnosed since as Addison's disease, lymphoma or tuberculosis.

Six were completed, and the publication order is not the order of composition:

• •Sense and Sensibility, 1811, published at her own financial risk and the first to appear, contrasting two sisters who manage feeling very differently
• •Pride and Prejudice, 1813, drafted in the 1790s as First Impressions and rejected unread by a publisher, the most widely read of the six
• •Mansfield Park, 1814, the least comfortable, with a passive heroine, a morally compromised household and money from a plantation in Antigua in the background
• •Emma, 1815, whose heroine she predicted no one but herself would much like, and which is built as a puzzle the reader is invited to solve and repeatedly fails to
• •Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published together in 1817 after her death, the first a comic assault on gothic novels and the second the most autumnal and most admired by many readers
• •Two unfinished works survive, The Watsons and Sanditon, along with the short epistolary Lady Susan

The marriage plot is the visible structure and the economics underneath it is the actual subject. Every novel opens by stating, often within a page, exactly how much money each character has, and the plots turn on the fact that a gentlewoman of her class had almost no way to acquire an income except by marrying one. Entail, the legal device by which an estate passes to a male heir regardless of the daughters, drives the whole of Pride and Prejudice; the collapse of a family's finances drives Sense and Sensibility; Persuasion opens with a baronet who must let his house because he cannot afford it. What makes the books read as comedy rather than protest is the method: free indirect style, in which the narration slides into a character's own idiom without announcing it, so that a foolish thought is reported in the fool's own words and the judgement is left to the reader. She did not invent the technique but she used it with a precision that made it standard, and it is why a sentence can be sympathetic and lethal at once.

The most common criticism is that the novels ignore the world they were written in. She wrote through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the industrial revolution and the debate over slavery, and a reader would learn little about any of them; two of her brothers served in the navy and a cousin's husband was guillotined. Charlotte Bronte complained that the books had no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill. The defence is that the wars are present in the form they took for the people she wrote about, since half the male characters are officers, militia are quartered in a town, and a naval officer's fortune in Persuasion comes from prize money; and that a novelist who wrote, as she put it, about three or four families in a country village, chose a scale on which she could be exact. Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park, which traces the household's income to the Antiguan plantation the owner leaves to visit, opened a long argument about whether the silences are evasions or the point.

Her name first appeared on her books in 1818, in a biographical notice written by her brother Henry that presented her as a modest, unambitious woman who wrote almost by accident, a portrait that stuck for a century and has taken a long time to dismantle. A nephew's memoir in 1870 revived interest and produced the first wave of devotees; the term Janeite dates from the 1890s and was originally used by male critics, including Kipling, who wrote a story about soldiers in the trenches of the First World War bound together by reading her. The modern explosion dates from the 1990s adaptations, and the industry now includes films, series, prequels, sequels, murder mysteries, zombie rewrites, tourism in Bath and Chawton, and an academic literature of enormous size. Very little of her manuscript work survives, since her sister Cassandra burned most of the letters after her death, which leaves the novels to speak for a life about which remarkably little is documented.

A Hampshire clergyman's daughter published four novels anonymously in her lifetime and two more posthumously, earning a few hundred pounds in total and dying at forty-one in 1817. The six books use the marriage plot to write about money, since her characters had almost no other route to an income, and their method is free indirect style, which reports a character's thoughts in their own words and leaves the judgement to the reader. Her brother's account of a modest accidental author shaped her reputation for a century, and her sister burned most of the letters.