Jane Austen Research Paper

The Austen family welcomed their seventh child and second daughter into the world on December 16, 1775. Born in Steventon, Hampshire, England, Jane Austen was raised by George and Cassandra Austen, respected members of community life. Her father lived as a “country clergyman, who had advanced himself through ambition and intelligence while her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was of much higher birth; one of her ancestors had been Lord Mayor of London under Queen Elizabeth I” (Telgen). She was the seventh child out of eight, and “her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra, who also remained unmarried” (Augustyn). She grew up in a family that stressed education and learning, yet “Austen and her older sister Cassandra ‘had little formal schooling’” (Telgen). Much of her knowledge of writing and literature came from “reading widely the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and many …show more content…
There is not much known about her early life, but “in 1802 it seem[ed] likely that Jane agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family, but the next morning changed her mind” (Augustyn). Her love life, which paralleled that of her sister Cassandra, remained incomplete. Although much of Austen’s writing discusses love and relationships, there is little to know about her personal love life due to “Cassandra, [who] was a jealous guardian of her sister's private life, and after Jane's death censored the surviving letters, destroying many and cutting up others” (Augustyn). Yet her novels provide undeniable evidence illustrating that Austen believed in the idea of love and sympathized, if not empathized, with the concept of love unrequited or