Jane Austen (1775–1817) was a English novelist who wrote such celebrated novels Sense and Sensibility (1811,) Pride and Prejudice (1813,) Mansfield Park (1814,) Emma (1815,) and Persuasion (1818.) The latter, together with the earlier Northanger Abbey (begun in 1798,) were published after her death.
Austen was born into the English gentry, whose customs feature prominently in her novels. She shared a room for her whole life with her older sister Cassandra. Neither of them ever married. Not much is known about Jane’s life beyond minor details recorded in the letters that have survived—Cassandra burned or edited most of Jane’s correspondence. Jane had no personal acquaintance with any other important writer.
At the focal point of all of Austen’s novels is the complicated maneuvering that leads to marriage. Austen considers marriage not as a simple romantic climax, but as a complex moral and social conciliation that exposes much about human nature and frailty by substituting mental clarity and good judgment with idealization and self-deception. In Sense and Sensibility, her first book, Austen attempts to make sense of the discord between demands of heart and head. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s best-known novel, protagonist Elizabeth Bennet realizes how appearances could mislead, and what she could learn from recognizing the prejudices of the observer.
Austen died at 42, probably of Addison’s disease, lymphoma, or—as has been recently alleged—arsenic poisoning.
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Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Pessimism, Sympathy
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
—Jane Austen
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Pride
Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Self-Discovery
There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women, Men and Women
Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
—Jane Austen
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
—Jane Austen
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Selfishness
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Life
It is indolence… Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Religion
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