Best known for her works Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion and for her social observation, she was born in Hampshire, a village of which her father, the Rev. George Austen, was rector.

Miss Austen never allowed her literary work to interfere with her domestic duties: sewing much and admirably, keeping house, writing many letters and reading aloud, she saw enough of middle-class provincial society to find a substance for her dramatic and humorous faculties, as expressed in her works.