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 bright, young heroines is courtship and finally marriage. Austen herself never married. Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen, was a rector. Austen’s father supported his daughter’s writing aspirations and tried to help her get a publisher. Austen focused on middle-class provincial life with humor and understanding. She depicted minor landed gentry, country clergymen and their families, in which marriage mainly determined women’s social status. Among the literary fraternity Charlotte Bronte and E.B. Browning found her limited and Elizabeth Hardwick said: "I don’t think her superb intelligence brought her happiness". It was not until the publication of J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in 1870 that a Jane Austen cult began to develop. Austen’s unfinished Sanditon was published in 1925. Austen was well connected with the middling-rich landed gentry that she portrayed in her novels. In Chawton she started to write her major works, among them Sense and Sensibility, the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters, Marianne and Elinor who try to find proper husbands to secure their social position. The novel was written in 1797 as the revision of a sketch called Elinor and Marianne, composed when the author was 20. According to some sources, an earlier version of the work was written in the form of a novel in letters and read aloud to the family as early as 1795. The present book carries a criticism of her novel Sense and Sensibility and spotlights her life details which will be enlightening and useful for the students of literature.
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