Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) is an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earn her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature.

Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lives her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry.

She is educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading.

The steadfast support of her family is critical to her development as a professional writer.

Her artistic apprenticeship lasts from her teenage years into her thirties.

During this period, she experiments with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tries then abandoned, and writes and extensively revises three major novels and begins a fourth.

From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieves success as a published writer.

She writes two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and begins a third, which is eventually titled Sanditon, but dies before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.

Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.

Her work bring her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduces her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she becomes widely accepted in academia as a great English writer.

The second half of the 20th century sees a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.

Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is "famously scarce", according to one biographer.

Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy.

Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother.

Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favor of "good quiet Aunt Jane".

Scholars have unearthed little information since.