How Jane Austen Became a Great Author

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Jane Austen is known for many of her great literature works. She has written six novels including Pride and Prejudice and Emma. When publishing her first four novels, Austen published them anonymously. Austen’s novels were extremely popular while she was living but became increasingly more popular after her death. Jane Austen’s unique style of writing was picked up on by nineteenth-century authors and used in their works (Steinbach).
On December 16th, 1775, an author by the name of Jane Austen was born in the village of Steventon of England (Shelton). Jane Austen was one of her parents’, George and Cassandra Austen, eight kids. Because of the time period when she grew up, five of her brothers were much better educated than Jane. Her schooling was instead, very brief and not much different than other girls at the time. She eventually went to study with her aunt, Mrs. Ann Cawley, in 1782. In 1784 Jane and her sisters were sent to a boarding school in Reading just for girls. This boarding school happens to be very similar to the one that Austen writes about in her novel Emma (“Jane Austen”).
Jane Austen’s family faced financial issues once her father had passed away. George Austen, Jane’s father, earned a modest income, but when he died, that all went away. The Austen boys had already moved away and had their own families going when George passed away, leaving Jane, her mother, and her sister in financial issues. All being women, they had a hard time finding a steady income, so that is when Jane Austen started to make money off of her novels. Austen lived the majority of her life without her own home and without a steady income. She constantly looked for financial help from her brothers and took whatever living conditions she woul...

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Steinbach, Susie L. "Austen, Jane." Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire. Ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. 130-132. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
Watt, Ian. “Austen, Jane”. The World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago, Illinois: World Book, Inc. 1993. Print.

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