Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children in a close and intellectually lively family. She never married, lived most of her life in modest circumstances, and wrote six novels that between them constitute one of the most precise and merciless accounts of English society ever put on paper. She died in 1817 at forty one, having published anonymously — her novels went out under the credit “By a Lady” — and never received the kind of public recognition during her lifetime that arrived in enormous waves after her death.

What makes Austen extraordinary is the gap between the smallness of her subject matter and the scale of what she does with it. She wrote about drawing rooms, country neighbourhoods, and the marriage prospects of young women with limited options, and in doing so said more about class, money, power, and human self-deception than most writers manage with wars and empires. Pride and Prejudice was drafted when she was twenty one, revised over years, and published in 1813. It sold out its first edition in eleven days.