Jane

Jane Austen, (1775-1817) major English novelist whose elegant, satirical, and witty fiction was highly influential in the development of the novel. Austen was born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon.The family was cultivated and prosperous, although not rich. Austen's father, himself an accomplished scholar, taught her at home and encouraged her reading and her writing. She learnt French and Italian, could draw and sing well. In the summer, she would take part in private theatricals in a barn near the family home. Austen was described by a contemporary as “a clear brunette with a rich colour, hazel eyes, fine features, and curling brown hair”. Her early novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, she later criticized as too brilliant and light, but they remain her best-loved and funniest books. Austen's six finished novels represent an extraordinary achievement and an important development in the history of the English novel. Austen turned her back on the Gothic novel form, of which an example is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the same year as Persuasion and Austen's own satire of the Gothic form, Northanger Abbey...

source En Carta 2000