Jane Austen is one of the world’s most enduring literary figures. Since she died in 1817, her timeless tales have rarely been out of print, and they’ve been turned into numerous mini-series and movies that still resonate with audiences today.
But what about the woman behind the words? From jilted engagements to vampire aristocrats, the Pride and Prejudice author led a fascinating life.
Below, we look at 18 things you might not know about Jane Austen.
1. We know relatively little about Jane's life
Little is known about Jane’s private life compared to many beloved authors from history.
After she died, her sister, Cassandra, who was also her best friend, burned or heavily censored much of their correspondence. And when Jane’s brother, Francis, passed away, his daughter destroyed all her letters to him too.
However, this mystery has only added to many people’s fascination with her.
2. Jane was one of eight
Jane was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire. She was the seventh child of the local rector, Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra.
The whole Austen family was very creative and well-read. The Reverend had a library containing hundreds of books and encouraged his children to be avid readers. Cassandra was known for her wittiness and talent for composing poetry. For fun, the family often put on plays in their barn or parlour room.
3. Jane first started writing at age 11
Sources place Austen’s earliest writing efforts at around 1787, making her 11 or 12. She wrote poems, as well as parodies and imitations of popular genres of the time – including sentimental novels.
These early writings – full of action and melodrama – may seem very different to her more composed, mature stories. However, they’re where Jane honed her distinctive voice.
The originals can be found in her notebooks, which are kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London. Though you can read some of them in this collection from Penguin.
4. Jane’s father tutored ‘the Vampyre Earl’
In 1773, at age five, John Wallop, the 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, was sent to live with Jane’s father to help with his stammer. Reverend Austen often took on pupils and boarders to top up his income from the church.
According to the Guardian, while he was young, John tried to hang another boy from the tower of a church. And, in adulthood, he became known as ‘the Vampyre Earl’ because he was rumoured to drink his servants’ blood.
The Earl was later tried in one of the longest, most expensive insanity cases in British history.
Jane Austen
5. Jane and her sister fell very ill as children
When they were six years old, Jane and Cassandra were sent away to school in Oxford and then Southampton. But both girls soon returned home when they came down with ‘putrid fever’ (also known as typhus).
This potentially fatal disease was brought back to Southampton by soldiers returning from service in Gibraltar. Symptoms include a rash, headaches, and high temperature.
Austen would later incorporate her experiences into Sense and Sensibility, in which the protagonist, Marianne Dashwood, comes down with a disorder of “putrid tendency”.
6. Jane wrote three novels by the time she was 23
At the tender age of 23, Austen had completed the original versions of three novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. Interestingly, Northanger Abbey wouldn’t be published until after her death.
7. Jane pioneered the use of free indirect discourse
While Jane Austen’s novels use an omniscient third-person narrator, you might notice that elements of the character’s inner thoughts and emotions often get tangled up in the narration. This is a literary device known as free indirect discourse, which Jane was an early pioneer of.
Take this line from Sense and Sensibility, for example: “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds: it would be liberal and handsome!” Here, the narration takes on John Dashwood’s excitable and self-satisfied manner.
By blending the boundary between first and third-person perspectives, Austen gives us intimate access into her character’s minds, while maintaining the flexibility of an omniscient third-person narrator – i.e. the ability to be anywhere at any time. This device was later developed by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
8. Jane refused a marriage proposal
Jane never married. The closest she ever came was in 1802 when Harris Bigg-Wither – a young aristocrat five years her junior – proposed. While she accepted at the time, she changed her mind the following morning, and historians aren’t sure why.
9. Jane published all of her novels anonymously
Jane never got to see her name in print because all of the novels published in her lifetime were done so anonymously, which was quite common for female authors at the time. The front cover of her first book, Sense and Sensibility, read simply: ‘By a Lady’, while her second, Pride and Prejudice said, ‘By the Author of Sense and Sensibility’.
Jane’s name was instead revealed by her brother, Henry, when Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published after her death.
10. Of all Austen’s characters, Mr Rushworth is the richest
Considering that most of Jane Austen’s books revolve around the English gentry, there are plenty of wealthy people in her works. But have you ever stopped to wonder who’s the richest? No, neither have we, but we’ve found out anyway.
Many people’s first guess would be Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy, as Mrs Bennet (the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet’s, mother) often mentions that his annual income sits at £10,000.
However, the richest Austen character of all is actually Mr Rushworth, the foolish and rather boring neighbour of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park, with an income of £12,000 per year. In today’s terms, this equates to around £800,000.
11. Charlotte Brontë was not a fan of Jane’s
While Jane Austen’s work has garnered plenty of praise over the centuries, one writer who wasn’t exactly a fan was Charlotte Brontë. While the Jane Eyre novelist believed that Austen’s writing was skilful, she thought Jane’s books were too superficial.
Of Emma, Brontë thought that Austen “ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound[.]” And, writing to a friend about Pride and Prejudice, said it was…
“[A] carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
Charlotte Brontë
12. Jane’s novels rarely mention the wars
During Austen’s life, England was frequently involved in conflict overseas – for example, in the Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars – and she had many close ties with these events. Two of her brothers (Frank and Charles) were distinguished navy men who served all over the globe.
However, relatively little mention is made of these conflicts in her novels, a fact that Winston Churchill commented on after being read Pride and Prejudice while suffering from pneumonia in World War Two…
“What calm lives they had, those people. No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”
13. Jane’s cousin-in-law was executed during the French Revolution
Elizabeth Hancock (later Eliza Capot, Comtesse de Feuillide) was Jane Austen’s first cousin on her father’s side. She’s frequently described as ‘flirtatious’ and ‘independent’, and was a regular visitor to the Austen family home.
While born in India, Eliza later settled in France where she married a wealthy Army Captain called Jean-François Capot de Feuillide, who claimed to be a count despite having any real right to the title. As a loyalist to the monarchy, Jean-François was later executed by guillotine during the French Revolution. Eliza escaped to London, where she married Jane’s brother, Henry.
Many scholars consider Eliza to have been a huge influence on Jane and her writing. It’s often suggested that she was the model for Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park.
14. Jane’s only portrait was drawn by her sister, Cassandra
The only authenticated image that we have of Jane Austen is a small watercolour painted by her sister, Cassandra, who was an avid artist. It was created sometime around 1810 and shows Jane sitting on a chair, cross-armed, looking off to the side.
The image served as the basis for a much more detailed engraving commissioned in the late 1800s by Jane’s nephew James Edward Austen Leigh. This later work was later replicated on the £10 note.
15. An FBI-trained forensic artist created a waxwork of Jane in 2014
While Cassandra’s portrait is the only authenticated image of Jane that we have, it’s not considered to be a very accurate representation. In fact, Jane’s niece describes it as “hideously unlike” her aunt.
With this in mind, the Jane Austen Centre commissioned FBI-trained forensic artist Melissa Dring to create a more accurate likeness of the writer. Using Cassandra’s watercolour as a starting point, Dring examined firsthand eyewitness accounts to create her waxwork, which was revealed in 2014.
Dring described the 3-D portrait as “as close as anyone can possibly get to her.” You can decide for yourself by visiting the Jane Austen Centre in Bath.
Jane Austen’s home in Chawton
16. Jane made the least money from her most popular book
Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most popular novel, having sold over 20 million copies. But, interestingly, this was the novel she was paid the least for after selling the copyright to publisher Thomas Egerton for £110 (around £6,500 in today’s money).
If you think this doesn’t sound like much – even by Victorian standards for female writers – then you’d be right. Sadly, Jane was never sufficiently paid for her work. By contrast, her contemporary Maria Edgeworth was paid £2,100 for her novel Patronage in 1814. That’s £140,500 in today’s money and over three times what Jane would earn in her entire lifetime.
17. Jane is thought to have died from Addison’s disease
At the age of 40, Jane began to show signs of a mysterious illness and later died when she was 41.
Modern experts have made plenty of educated guesses as to the cause of her death – from lupus to lymphoma. But Addison’s disease – a rare disorder of the adrenal glands – seems to be the prevailing answer.
In 2011, after reading some of her surviving letters, crime writer Lindsay Ashford boldly suggested that the scribe could have been intentionally poisoned with arsenic. The former president of the Jane Austen Society in North America even claimed that a lock of her hair had tested positive for arsenic. However, Jane was likely prescribed medicine containing small amounts of arsenic as a treatment for her illness.
18. The last thing Jane wrote was a comic verse about English weather
Though famous for her novels, the last thing Jane wrote was a comic poem about dreary British weather known as: ‘Written at Winchester on Tuesday the 15th July 1817’.
In her final days, Jane travelled from her home in Chawton to Winchester to receive medical treatment. The 15th, three days before she passed away, was not only the day of the Winchester races, but it was also St Swithin’s Day. Traditional tells that if it rains on St Swithin’s Day, the downpour will continue for 40 days.
Final thoughts…
While we might not know much about Jane Austen’s life compared to other literary figures, there are still lots of surprising things to learn about the Emma author – many of which can give us a richer and deeper understanding of her novels.
So, whether it was that her cousin-in-law faced the guillotine in revolutionary France or that Charlotte Brontë wasn’t her biggest fan, we hope you learned something you didn’t know before.
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Did you enjoy any of these facts? Or do you have any about Jane Austen that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.