Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the author of several books, including Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.