Born into a working class family with little money or status, Jane Austen became one of the most popular authors of all time. Works such as Emma and Northanger Abbey are widely regarded as classic social commentaries which still have relevance today, despite the fact that we don't wear such tight-fitting clothing anymore.

A Troubled Childhood
Jane Millington Austen was born in a public house in Winchester, in 1775. Her father was the Rev. Steven Austen; her mother, Margaret Trapster, worked in a cigarette-stuffing factory. Despite their poor situation and strict Christian background, the Austens obviously went at it hammer and tongs, for they had seven further children in as many years.

Visiting their home in Winchester in 1780, Lord Finston, the most prolific social documenter of the time, wrote:

"Amongst the debris of these poor people I chanced upon a young child of no more than three score months, who held an intelligence the like of which I had not before encountered. When I asked her if she was happy, she replied 'No sir, for I am covered in filthy shit.' It was clear to me then that this young thing would make her mark."
Conditions of the Working Classes in Winchester, Winston (Lord) Finston 1782, p387.

Austen and Wigg-Bithers. Photograph taken just after the invention of photography

Love and Marriage
During her teenage years Austen attended functions at Lionel Jeffries' mansion in Bath. Jeffries' wife Ruth often made passing reference to Austen in her diaries, remarking that she was "the prettiest young trollop that one ever did set eyes upon." Needless to say, she had little trouble finding love, in the form of Captain Henry Wigg-Bithers, whom she married in 1803. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published in this year, and in the young heroine Mimsey, Austen is clearly representing her own thoughts about love.

She [Mimsey] had loved, and loved still, and she had had all the suffering which only a loving life can bring, enduring under the irrational disappointment of the hopeless loss of tempered ill-usage.

Success
Reviews of her first novel were not favourable (the London Times called it "a lackadaisical meatfest"), but this did not deter the public. The first print run sold out in only five weeks. Whilst pregnant with her first daughter Norris, Austen wrote most of Mansfield Park, in which the heroine Fanny, like Mimsey before her, worries constantly about minor things most people don't give a toss about. Mansfield Park was followed by Emma, and then after the family returned from a sightseeing trip to Rome, disaster struck. Austen had been carrying her second child, but after only seven months she gave birth to a live ape. There was no question of keeping the baby - under the strict moral codes of the day she would have been ostracized - so one of her husband's friends had the child discreetly destroyed. This is how Austen's sister Cassandra reported the incident in a letter to their Aunt:

My dear Aunt Clarissa... I had the great bad fortune to be defeated in a rubber, Tuesday last. I swear that I shall never partner with that hopeless Dr Crawshaw again! In addition he is never punctual at dinner, and he does simper so. But he did a good job of getting rid of Jane's ape-child.

Illness
In time, these traumatic events brought Austen to a low ebb. Wigg-Bithers began to seek comfort in the arms of a mistress - widely believed to be the Marquis of Yeovil - and Austen turned to drink. Northanger Abbey, arguably her most accomplished work, centred on the tribulations of the middle-aged heroine Amelia, a social climber with an addiction to absinthe. In a sadly prophetic scene, Amelia confronts Edmund Bertram in the study.

Amelia, who had observed this with tremulation, looked at Mr. Bertram. "I need not repeat what has just passed."
"Well you'll have to - I'm deaf as a post."

At the time of her death Austen was working on a new novel, Trainspotting. This was to remain unfinished, although it was later made into a successful film.