Jane Austen was born in the rectory at Steventon, a village in Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra. It was a lively, bookish family that put on plays in the barn and read novels aloud in the evenings, and as a girl Jane filled notebooks with wild comic stories to make them laugh.

By her early twenties she had drafted three novels. In 1797 her father offered one of them, then called First Impressions, to a London publisher, who declined it by return of post without reading it. A few years later she sold another, Susan, for ten pounds; the publisher sat on it and never printed it.

She kept revising. When the family moved to Chawton, in Hampshire, in 1809, her brother Edward gave his mother and sisters a cottage, and there Jane wrote and revised at a small table in the sitting room. According to family tradition, she liked that a door nearby creaked, because it warned her that someone was coming and gave her time to hide her pages.

Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811, published at her own risk and credited only to “A Lady.” First Impressions, rewritten and retitled Pride and Prejudice, followed in 1813, and was an immediate success. Mansfield Park and Emma came next. The Prince Regent was a fan, and Austen was invited, in a way that could not be refused, to dedicate Emma to him, although she disliked him.

Her novels are about young women of modest means deciding whom to marry, in a world where marriage was almost the only way to secure a future. They are also among the funniest and most clear-eyed books ever written about money, class, vanity and self-deception. Austen fell ill in 1816 and died in Winchester in July 1817, at forty-one. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published that December, with a note by her brother Henry that told readers, for the first time, her name.