Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in Steventon Rectory, a village in north-east Hampshire, England, on December 16, 1775. The Austen family later moved to Bath and then to Chawton in Hampshire. The seventh of eight children, she started writing a young age, and is now one of the most widely read and respected of all English language novelists, but was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime. Her six major novels, now considered literary classics are Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, and are celebrated for their humorous and pointed observations of societal life.
