ABSTRACT
The happiest and most productive years in the life of Jane Austen 1 (1775– 1817) were passed in two small towns of Hampshire. She was the seventh of the eight children of the rector of Steventon. In the Austen family there existed a sympathetic affection based upon an identity of tastes and an outlook upon life illuminated by lightly ironic detachment. Jane's juvenilia— Love and Freindship and the little pieces collected in Volume the First— are mostly burlesques and parodies written for the amusement of the family. She moved in this intimate circle throughout her uneventful life. However, her experience of provincial society gradually broadened, and she had visited Bath before, on her father's retirement, the Austens settled there in 1801. By that time she had written, besides a number of minor things, first versions of three of her novels. In the uncongenial atmosphere of Bath she accomplished little; nor were the three years (1806–1809) in Southampton, where, after her father's death, she lived with her mother, more fruitful. Not until she breathed again the congenial air of the provincial town of Chawton did the creative instinct reassert itself. There she was very active till, shortly before her death, she moved to Winchester.
