Jane Austen was born on 16th December 1775 at the Rectory, Steventon, Basingstoke, Hampshire, the seventh child of George Austen (1731-1805) and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827) who had married on 26th April 1764 at Bath. George Austen, who was descended from the Austens of Horsmonden, was born at Tonbridge; educated at Tonbridge School and St John's College, Oxford; ordained deacon at Oxford in 1754; priest at Rochester in 1755; and curate at Shipbourne; before the family bebefactor Thomas Knight of Godmersham presented George Austen to the living at Steventon, Hampshire in 1761. After his marriage to Cassandra the Austens moved into the rectory at Deane and then in mid summer 1768 into the rectory at Steventon where Jane Austen was born seven years later.

Jane Austen's novels - Sense and Sensibility (published 1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Parke (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818) and Nothanger Abbey (1818) - established her as a pre-eminent novelist in English literature. Howover, it was in October 1796 that Jane Austen had started to write Pride and Prejudice, under the title of First Impressions, as a reaction to Kent society after visiting her brother Edward and his wife Elizabeth at Rowling, Goodnestone, Kent. The novel was finished in August 1797 but declined by the publisher Thomas Cadell and not published untill 1813.

In 1801 the Austen family moved to Bath, and, on the death of her father George Austen in 1805, Jane, her sister Cassandra and her mother moved to Southampton and lived with her brother Frank and his family. In 1809, Jane's brother Edward acquired a cottage at Chawton in Hampshire for Jane, Cassandra and her mother, and it was here that Jane completed her later novels. Suffering from ill-health, Jane moved to Winchester in May 1817 where she died on 18th July 1817 at the age of forty-one.