By Brian Boone
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. While enjoying only moderate success in her lifetime (1775 to 1817), her insightful observations on the human behavior, gender relations, and romance would eventually make her one of the most well-read and beloved authors ever. But still, not much is known about the writer. Here then are some obscure facts, Austenites.
What a joke
Jane Austen books are “witty” and “amusing” but they’re not altogether “funny.” But her first projects were. At age 12, Austen wrote an experimental novel called The Beautiful Cassandra, dedicated to her sister that consisted entirely of a mawkish dedication and an errand list. At 14, she wrote Love and Freindship, a parody of romance novels with an intentionally misspelled title, and a year later, she finished a 34-page history-mocking faux textbook called History of England.
She ought to be in pictures
Only four of Austen’s novels were published in her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Two more were printed posthumously, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey. All of those have been adapted into movies, making Austen the only major novelist in the English language whose entire catalog has made it to the silver screen.
Finishing early
She found her voice while very young. Austen finished writing Sense and Sensibility when she was 19. By the time she turned 23, she’s outlined and turned out rough drafts of all of her subsequent books.
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She’s the inspiration
Austen revealed such truths about life in her Regency-era novels that they can serve as the blueprint for contemporary entertainment. The book and novel Bridget Jones’ Diary is based on Pride and Prejudice, while its sequel, Bridget Jones’ Baby, is a take on Persuasion. Fire Island is based on Pride and Prejudice, too, while the teen classic Clueless is a retelling of Emma.
Not the marrying kind
While she wrote frequently and intuitively about affairs of the heart, Austen’s romantic history is scant. She never married, although she assumed the courtship she enjoyed at age 19 from Thomas Lefroy, the nephew of a family friend, would wind up with a proposal, but it never came and Austen moved on. At age 27, Harris Bigg-Wither, a friend’s brother, proposed marriage. Austen accepted, and then rescinded the next day.
Best book ever written by “A Lady”
Like something out of a Jane Austen novel, early 1800s Regency-era England’s high society circles would have found it scandalous for a woman from a good family to do something so lowly as publish a book. So, her novels in the 1810s were published and sold essentially anonymously. Sense and Sensibility was mysteriously credited to “A Lady”; Pride and Prejudice was said to have sprung from the pen of “the author of Sense and Sensibility.”
Want to wish Jane Austen a happy birthday? Then take our year-long Jane Austen Reading Challenge!