Jane Austen is one of the most well-known and widely-read English novelists of all time. She was born on December 16, 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, in Hampshire, England. Jane's fascination with words and with the world of stories, began quite early. In the 1790s, during her adolescence, she started writing her own novels, the first one being Love and Freindship [sic]-- a parody of romantic fiction organized as a series of love letters.
Between 1811 and 1816, Jane started to anonymously publish her works. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were all published during this time. Jane started working on Persuasion, her last completed novel, soon after she finished Emma. Written in her unique and distinctive style, it subtly exposes the rapidly changing and expanding social environment of the nineteenth century England. Completed in 1816, it was published posthumously in December 1817. In 1816, at the age of forty-one, Jane became ill with Addison's disease. She died on July 18, 1817.
