Today (16 December) is the birthday of one of our most famous and best loved novelist, Jane Austen, and marks her 250th anniversary.
Celebrations have been going on for weeks with book promotions, film, TV series, audio dramatisations, podcasts and online discussions, so it would be very hard to have not heard about her, or her work.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire. From as early as 11 years old she wrote stories and poems for herself and to amuse her family. Although she wrote novels before she was 22 none of her work was published until she was 35 and even then they were anonymous. These were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). All had moderate successes, but didn’t bring her fame in her lifetime.
She wrote two other novels — Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published posthumously in 1817. She began another, Sanditon, unfinished on her death. There were three manuscript volumes of juvenile writings, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons. Since her death Austen’s novels have rarely been out of print.
In the months after her death in July 1817, Cassandra Austen, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note dated December 1817, in which he identified his sister as the author of the novels. Sales were good for a year.
So check the list below. What have you read – not seen on TV/film or listen to, but actually read!
- Mansfield Park (1983)
- Northanger Abbey (1987)
- Pride & Prejudice (1995) a wonderful series with Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle
- Sense & Sensibility (2008)
- Emma (2009)
All available on BBC iPlayer. BBC 4Extra have been serialising Lady Susan, written in 1794, as a series of letters from the widowed Lady Susan Vernon as she schemes her way through high society looking for a suitable (and profitable) husband. This novella wasn’t published until 1871.
deilibri 