Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions- a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

Patricia A. Matthew is an English professor who teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture at Montclair State University. A specialist in the history of the novel, she writes about a range of topics for scholars and the general public. Her work has been published in academic journals, and she has written about Jane Austen, Bridgerton, and Sanditon for The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. The coeditor of the Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Cultures, she is a regular lecturer for the Jane Austen Society of North America. She is currently writing a book on sugar, abolition, and material culture.

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