Becoming Jane

Jane Austen is one of Britain’s greatest celebrated authors of all time. Born at Steventon Parsonage on 16 December 1775- Jane Austen was seventh sibling of eight children! She grew up in a rather happy and close-knit family, where she began to write at a very young age. Jane had a loving alliance with her only sister Cassandra which lasted a life time, and both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility revolve around sisterhood.

 

*“Mr Austen reported with relief. ‘We have now another girl, a plaything for Cassy and a future companion.”

 

Her plots often explore the dependency that women have on marriage, in the pursuit of social and economic security- with each novel rich in: romance, wit and satire. She is well known for Pride and Prejudice which she called: “my own darling child” and it has furthermore gone on to make many contemporary films along with TV series. It was during the 1790s she wrote the first drafts of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. It was her trips to Kent and Bath that gave her the colour for the settings of these books.

Jane’s novels reflect England of the period it was wrote in and as she herself had experienced it. It explores a multiplicity of issues- some underlying yet some more obvious and detectible. She is a notorious author, whose work has never or will ever age… a timeless classic.

I am currently looking at- *Jane Austen at Home: A Biography. It is a great account into the life of Jane Austen. I titled this blog post ‘Becoming Jane’ after the BBC film staring Anne Hathaway and James Mcavoy, which tells the story of Jane Austen’s early life.