Jane Austen

Austen was the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman, and wrote her first versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in her early twenties, in a rectory full of family who heard them read aloud. Publication took another fifteen years.

The move to Bath in 1801 seems to have stopped her. She wrote almost nothing there. Her father died in 1805, leaving his widow and daughters dependent on the charity of their brothers, and it was only in 1809, settled in a cottage at Chawton, that she began again — revising the early manuscripts and writing Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion at a small twelve-sided table by a window.

All four novels published in her lifetime appeared anonymously, the first as "By a Lady", and she earned somewhere near six hundred pounds from her writing in total. She was never a public figure; her authorship was disclosed by her brother Henry only after her death in 1817, at forty-one, of an illness still not confidently identified. What she achieved inside that small compass — six novels, no wars, no crimes — reorganised what the English novel could do with ordinary life.