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- one of eight children of a country rector, who acknowledged the importance of education – despite of being a girl, she could read a lot and started writing as very young
- close to her sister Cassandra
- from time to time, travelled to Bath (later she moved there for a while) and London, which together with the countryside where she lived create the settings of her novels
- her earliest writings include plays, verses and short novels, which parody sentimental novels popular at those times
- in her later novels gently satirised the social mores of the English country, making fun of the drama of Gothic Romanticism
- her novels are often described as belonging to a new genre in England in the eighteenth century – the novel of manners
- never married, however, she is believed to have agreed to marry one man but changed her mind the next day, the evidence about any other relationships is incomplete, her sister was very secretive about this topic and censored her letters before showing them to the public
- despite not being married herself, wrote about marriages, relationships, matchmaking but also about her heroines´ tension with the society and its beliefs about the role of women
- her characters are ordinary middle-class people
- wrote with subtle wit and irony without being too moralistic or didactic
- at the beginning, several unsuccessful attempts to publish her writings
- her first published novel was SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1811), she published it anonymously
- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), firstly entitled First Impressions, was published as the second one, still without her name
- MANSFIELD PARK (1814) and EMMA (1815) followed
- spent the last months of her life busy writing PERSUASION (1817) and NORTHANGER ABBEY (1817), another text, a self-mocking satire describing health resorts remained unfinished
- her authorship was announced by her brother only after her death
- she wrote during the Romantic period, however, her novels share only some of its typical features (focus on the emotions, the individual and the natural world) , other features (order, style, satire) are described as Augustan
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