简奥斯丁英文简介

English writer, who first gave the novel its modern character through the treatment of everyday life. Although Austen was widely read in her lifetime, she published her works anonymously. The most urgent preoccupation of her young, well-bred heroines is courtship, and finally marriage. Austen's best-known books include Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816). Virginia Woolf called her "the most perfect artist among women."

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The first 25 years of her life Austen spent in Hampshire. She was tutored at home. Her parents were avid readers and she received a broader education than many women of her time. On her father's retirement, the family moved to Bath.

Austen focused on middle-class provincial life with humor and understanding. She depicted the life of minor landed gentry, country clergymen and their families, in which marriage mainly determined women's social status. Most important for her were those little matters, as Emma says, "on which the daily happiness of private life depends." Although Austen restricted to family matters, and she passed the historical events of the Napoleonic wars, her wit and observant narrative touch has been inexhaustible delight to readers. Of her six great novels, four were published anonymously during her lifetime. At her death on July 18, 1817 in Winchester, Austen was writing the unfinished Sanditon. Austen was buried in Winchester Cathedral.