Jane austen brief biography samples

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, to Rev. George Austen and the former Cassandra Leigh in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children. Like the central characters in most of her novels, the Austens were a large family of respectable lineage but no fortune; her father supplemented his "living" — his clergyman's income — by farming.

This lively and cheerful family frequently passed their evenings in novel-reading, charades and amateur theatrics. Among her siblings, her sister Cassandra, three years older, was her lifelong friend and confidant.

Her large family supplied material for the kind of novels popular when she wrote, but she chose not to draw upon any of it: her mother, for example, was related to a Duke who was master of Balliol College, Oxford; one aunt married an admiral; another, Mrs.

Leigh Perrot, was falsely imprisoned for petty theft in 1799; a cousin, the Comtesse de Feuillide, fled the Reign of Terror after the execution of her husband, came