Jane Austen (1775-1817), Novelist

Sitter associated with 5 portraits
Few English novelists have commanded such popular affection and critical respect as the author of Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816). She was a writer of refinement and charm, whose honesty and sense of irony helped shape some of the supreme masterpieces of nineteenth-century fiction. Austen never married and lived quietly with her family in Hampshire then in Bath (1800-5). Her six main novels made ordinary domestic life a compelling subject for fiction. She drew on her own observations of genteel social relations, courtship and the position of women during the Regency. She modestly compared her writing to painting literary miniatures on 'a little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory'.