than is commonly thought. Sentimental biography pictures her undisturbed in comfortable and stable village surroundings. But Jane lived at the troubled border of comfortability in a number of ways. Her family belonged to the so-called “pseudo-gentry,” the professional rank of a rural society still dominated by a land-owning class. Jane was the daughter of a clergyman who lived as middle-class, but at the price of continual debt, partly alleviated by taking in student-boarders throughout her childhood until the house was crowded. The Austen family was “gentry” not by birth but by virtue of her father’s (low-paying) profession, and they were frequently dependent on connections from whom they could borrow money. Jane Austen’s circumstances were unstereotypical, even painful, in other ways as well: She was a woman who was fully aware of the necessity of marriage to relieve the inequity of power and resources for women, and rejected that option at least once. While happiest in the village she was raised in, she was forced by her parents to live in uncongenial surroundings in the tourist town of Bath for years, until her father’s death. And not least, later in life she was a female novelist earning her own money, a very unusual circumstance in her class. Though Austen’s life tends to be conflated with those of her characters, it is ironic that even Elizabeth Bennet’s financial situation is in fact much better than her author’s was.

While her father, George Austen, was a country parson of limited means who frequently had recourse to borrow money from better-off relatives and could rarely afford a carriage of his own, Austen’s mother, the former Cassandra Leigh, came from a better-connected family with some intellectual and genteel roots. Jane’s father was kindly and indulgent, her mother hypochondriacal yet active and strong-minded. The social life of the family was extensive and complicated, with a wide-ranging network of kin and intimates to visit and entertain and gossip about, yet the picture of stable rural society most people associate with Jane Austen was not true even then. The Austens socialized most with people like themselves, the new professional class of people with some money and education but no ancestral land, who tended to mobility, renting or buying this property or that, moving from town to city and back again, changing dwellings with professions and very often driven away by debt.

Jane herself, as a single woman with no portion of her own, was considered a poor relative by the more successful members of the family, such as the family of her brother Edward. As a boy Edward had been adopted by wealthy childless kin, the Knights, and took their name after their death. He inherited an estate, Godmersham, to which Jane was invited often, and at which she was perceived as an outsider. Her niece Fanny, Edward’s eldest daughter, wrote after her aunt’s death that she was “below par” in refinement (though “superior in mental powers and cultivation”) and had deliberately to overcome her “common-ness” when visiting. Here is Austen’s cheerful assessment of herself in 1815: “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”

Jane Austen began to compose fiction at a young age, at least in early adolescence if not before, producing extravagant parodies, such as “Love and Friendship,” that she dedicated to various family members and friends. Her mother was in the habit of writing clever comic verses to amuse the family, and helped Jane read aloud her novels later on; her father seems to have encouraged her writing, since a notebook in which she transcribed her early stories is marked “Ex dono mei Patris,” which means “a gift from my father.” The first draft of Pride and Prejudice, called “First Impressions,” was probably composed when she was twenty, the same age as its protagonist, Elizabeth Ben-net, though it was not published until 1813, near the end of Austen’s life.

For a novelist so identified with romantic love, courtship, and marriage as literary subjects, her life is notoriously bare of evidence that she ever experienced love or romance. She did flirt with one young man, Tom Lefroy, but wrote of him coolly when he left the country: “This is rational enough; there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner ... it is therefore most probable that