Person

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was a British novelist who transformed the social and romantic novel into a brilliantly controlled art of irony, observation, and quiet female intelligence. In Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, she created heroines written with wit, grace, and an unerring eye for the difference between real affection and social performance. Her compact but lasting body of work includes six completed novels, early writings, unfinished fiction, and surviving letters. Although her books examine courtship, marriage, money, and expectation with extraordinary precision, Austen herself never married. Perhaps that distance gave her the perfect view of the marriage market — close enough to understand its rules, and far enough away to smile at them.