Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) published six novels in her lifetime, all of them anonymously — the title pages said only “By a Lady”. She wrote about a narrow social world on purpose: three or four families in a country village, courtship, money, and the small negotiations that decide a woman’s whole future when she cannot earn her own living. Her reputation as a gentle writer of romances is a later invention. The prose is closer to surgery, and the famous lines quoted here nearly always carry an irony that disappears when they are lifted out of the paragraph. Every Austen line on this site is checked against the text and cited by chapter.