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Jane Austen Jane Austen(1775¡ª1817) was born in Hampshire, in southern England, of a country clergyman¡¯s family and, educated at home and never married throughout her life, led an uneventful life of forty-odd years at her native place and in the small towns nearby, paying only occasional visits to London. Her father had a good job as rector, three of her brothers were officers in the army or the navy, her eldest brother succeeded their father as clergyman, while her third brother, adopted by a wealthy relative, became a rather big landed gentleman. Though during her life the wars between England and France following the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon to power brought economic troubles to the English nation and the death of her father brought the family to somewhat straitened pecuniary conditions at one time, she never really had to worry about money and her life was rather quiet and comfortable all the way through, living with her parents and then with her unmarried sister. She started writing novels early in life and at first had difficulties in getting them published, but later became somewhat well-known so that the Prince Regent indirectly asked her to dedicate one of her novels to him. Jane Austen wrote and completed six novels. They are: Sense and Sensibility(1811), Pride and Prejudice(1813), Mansfield Park(1814), Emma(1816), Northanger Abbey(1818),and Persuasion(1818). Fragments and early drafts include: Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, on which she was working when she died. In fact it is hard to divide her writing career, for she lived most of her life in a community much like the one we find in Pride and Prejudice and all of her six novels deal with ¡°the business of getting married,¡± are comedies involving either solitary heroines or young women educated by events to cast aside their illusions.
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