Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works include Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey. Her biting social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect discourse and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honored novelists in English Literature.
Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute comedies of manners. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818. Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; her anonymity kept her out of leading literary circles.
Austen's comedies of manners, especially Emma, are often cited for their perfection of form. Modern critics continue to unearth new perspectives on Austen's keen commentary regarding the predicament of unmarried genteel English women in the late 1790s and early 1800s, a consequence of inheritance law and custom, which usually directed the bulk of a family's fortune to eldest male heirs.
Although Austen's career coincided with the Romantic movement in literature, she was not an intensely passionate Romantic. She was more neo-classical. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel: the young woman who exercises twice a day is more likely to find real happiness than one who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Austen's artistic values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her contemporaries William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Among Austen's influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.
Although Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also sceptical of its opposite -- excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels. Jane loved to write her novels in peace and she only shared them with her family when they were performing plays.