Have you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories? What was happening in their lives to inspire their famous works? What was happening in the world at the time that they wrote those stories you love?

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For the next few weeks we will talk about the life of Jane Austen. What inspired her to write Emma? What else was happening in the world at the time?

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Welcome to Bite at a Time Books Behind the Story, where we answer the questions you have about your favorite classic authors.

What inspired your favorite author to write their novels?

What was going on in the world at the time?

Follow along with us as is we tell you what was happening in the world while your favorite authors wrote your favorite classics.

My name is Brie Carlyle and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

All of the links for our show are in the Show Notes.

Today we will be talking about the life of Jane Austen.

Jane Austen, December 16, 1775, to July 18, 1817, was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed Gentry.

At the end of the 18th century, Austin's plots often explored the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security.

Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th century literary realism.

Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.

With the publication of since Insensibility 1811 Pride and Prejudice 1813, Mansfield Park 1814, and Emma 1816, she achieved modest success and little Fame in her lifetime as the books were published anonymously.

She wrote two other novels, North Hanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumorously in 1818 and began another eventually titled senditin, but died before its completion.

She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings and manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and another unfinished novel, The Watsons.

Austin gained far more status after her death, and her six fulllength novels have rarely been out of print.

A significant transition in her post humorous reputation occurred in 1833 when her novels were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novel series, illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering, and sold as a set.

They gradually gained wider acclaim and popular readership.

In 18, 69, 52 years after her death, her nephew's publication of a memoir, Jane Austin, introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience.

Austin has inspired a large number of critical essays and literary anthologies.

Her novels have inspired many films, from 1940s Pride and Prejudice to more recent productions like Simpsons Ability and Love and Friendship, 2016.

Little biographical information about Austin's life exists except the few letters that survived and the biographical notes her family members wrote during her lifetime.

Austin may have written as many as 3000 letters, but only 161 survived.

Her older sister Cassandra burned or destroyed the bulk of letters she received in 1843 to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives and ensuring that younger nieces did not read any of Jane Austin's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbors or family members.

Cassandra meant to protect the family's reputation from her sister's Penchant for forthrightness in the interest of tact, she omitted details of family illnesses and unhappiness.

The first Austin biography was Henry Thomas Austin's 1818 biographical notice.

It appeared in a post humorous edition of North Hanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters against the judgment of other family members.

Details of Austin's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephews A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austin Lee's biography, Jane Austen Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters.

The legend the family and relatives created reflected their bias in favoring of presenting the image of good, quiet Aunt Jane, the portrayal of a woman whose domestic situation was happy and whose family was the mainstay of her life.

Modern biographers include details previously excised from the letters and family biographies, but Austin scholar Jan Fergus explains that the challenge is to avoid the presenting the opposite view.

One of Austin languishing in periods of deep unhappiness, who was an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family.

Jane Austin was born in Stephenson, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775.

She was born a month later than her parents expected.

Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago.

He added that the newborn infant was a present plaything for Cassie and a future companion.

The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh, and it was not until April 5 that she was baptized at the local Church with the single name Jane.

George Austin, five served as the Rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon and at nearby Dean.

He came from an old, respected, and wealthy family of wool merchants.

As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, the wealth was divided, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty.

He and his two sisters were orphaned as children and had to be taken in by relatives.

His sister Philadelphia went to India to find a husband, and George entered St.

John's College, Oxford, on a Fellowship, where he most likely met Cassandra Lee, 1739 to 1827.

She came from the prominent Lee family.

Her father was Rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the Gentry.

Her eldest brother, James, inherited a fortune and large estate from his great aunt Pierre, with the only condition that he changed his name to Lee Perot.

The two were engaged probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures.

George had received the living for the Steventon Parish from the wealthy husband of his second cousin, Thomas Knight.

They married on April 26, 1764, at St.

Swinton's Church in Bath by license in a simple ceremony two months after Cassandra's father died.

Their income was modest.

With Georgia's small per annum living, Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance.

At the time of her mother's death, the Austins took up temporary residence at the nearby DN.

Rectory until Stephenson, a 16th century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations.

Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Dee Anne James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767.

Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to 18 months.

In 1768 the family finally took up residence in Steventon.

Henry was the first child to be born there in 1771.

At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that Little George was developmentally disabled.

He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered.

In 1773 Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774 and Jane in 1775.

According to Honan, the atmosphere of the Austin home was an open, amused, easy, intellectual one where the ideas of those with whom the Austin's might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.

The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members.

Mrs.

Austin spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister Philadelphia and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs.

Walter and her daughter Philly.

Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Laffey, the bright Comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system, of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descent upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works.

Cassandra Austin's cousin Thomas Lee visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781.

The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents on her return and almost home they were when they met Jane and Charles, the two little ones of the family who had to go as far as New Down to meet the Chase and have the pleasure of riding home in it.

Lafay writes that Mr.

Austin's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified.

Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane.

While in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand and between Henry and Jane on the other.

From 1773 until 1796, George Austin supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time who boarded at his home.

The Reverend Austin had an annual income of £200, £32,000 or $42,000 USD in 2022 from his two livings.

This was a very modest income at the time.

By comparison, a skilled worker, like a blacksmith or a Carpenter could make about £100 annually, while the typical annual income of a Gentry family was between £1000 and £5000.

During this period of her life, Austin attended Church regularly, socialized with friends and neighbors, and read novels, often of her own composition allowed to her family in the evenings.

Socializing with the neighbors often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall.

Her brother Henry later said that Jane was fond of dancing and excelled in it.

In 1783, Austin and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs.

Anne Collie, who took them with her to Southampton when she moved there later in the year.

In the autumn, both girls were sent home when they caught typhus and Austin nearly died.

Austin was from then home educated until she attended boarding school in Reading with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls School, ruled by Mrs.

Laturnell, who had a Cork leg and a passion for theater.

The school curriculum probably included some French spelling, needlework, dancing and music, and perhaps drama.

The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austin family.

After 1786, Austin never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment.

The remainder of her education came from Reading, guided by her father and brothers, James and Henry.

Irene Collins believes that Austin used some of the same school books as the boys her father tutored.

Austin apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings.

Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library.

Her father was also tolerant of Austin's sometimes risque experiments in writing and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.

Private Theatricals were an essential part of Austin's education.

From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the Rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals and David Garrick's Bonton.

Austin's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues, and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant.

Most of the plays were comedies, which suggest how often satirical gifts were cultivated.

At the age of twelve she tried her own hand at dramatic writing.

She wrote three short plays during her teenage years.

From the age of eleven and perhaps earlier, Austin wrote poems and stories for her own and her family's amusement.

In these works the details of daily life are exaggerated, common plot devices are parodied, and the stories are full of anarchic fantasies of female power, license, illicit behavior, and general high spirits.

According to Janet Todd, containing work written between 1787 and 1793, Austin compiled fair copies of 29 early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia.

She called the three notebooks volume the first volume the second, and volume the third, and they preserved 900 words she wrote during those years.

The juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkins Boisterous and anarchic.

He compares them to the work of 18th century novelist Lawrence Stern, among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Friendship, written at the age of 14 in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility.

The next year she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolor miniatures by her sister Cassandra.

Austin's history parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England, 1764.

Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Friendship, Austin decided to write for profit to make stories her central effort, that is, to become a professional writer.

When she was around 18 years old, Austin began to write longer, more sophisticated works.

In August 1792, aged 17, Austin started writing Catherine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially North Hanger Abbey.

It was left unfinished, and the story picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catherine.

A year later she began but abandoned a short play later titled Sir Charles Grandison or The Happy Man, a comedy in six acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800.

This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austin's favorite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, by Samuel Richardson.

When Austin became an aunt for the first time at age 18, she sent newborn niece F**** Catherine Austen Knight five short pieces of the juvenilea now known collectively as Scraps purporting to be her opinions and admonitions on the conduct of young women.

For Jane Anna Elizabeth Austin, also born in 1793, her aunt wrote two more miscellaneous morsels, dedicated them to Anna on June 2, 1793, convinced that if you seriously attend to them, you will derive from them very important instructions with regard to your conduct in life.

There is manuscript evidence that Austin continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811, when she was 36, and that her niece and nephew Anna and James Edward Austin made further additions as late as 1814.

Between 1793 and 1785, aged 18 to 20, Austin wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work.

It is unlike any of Austin's other works.

Austin biographer Claire Tomlin describes the Novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her lovers, friends, and family.

According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Fulaide, who inspired Austin with stories of her glamorous life in various adventures.

Eliza's French husband was Guillotined.

In 1794 she married Jane's brother, Henry Austin, in 1797, when Austin was 20, Tom Lefroy, a neighbor, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796.

He had just finished a University degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister.

Lefroy and Austin would have been introduced at a ball or other neighborhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austin's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together.

I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.

Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.

Austin wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a very gentleman like, good looking, pleasant young man.

Five days later, in another letter, Austin wrote that she expected an offer from her friend and that I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.

Going on to write, I will confide myself in the future to Mr.

Tom LaFroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence and refuse all others.

The next day, Austin wrote, the day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this, it will all be over.

My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea.

Halperin cautioned that Austin often satirized popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about LaFroy may have been ironic.

However, it is clear that Austin was genuinely attracted to LaFroy, and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him.

The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January.

Marriage was impractical, as both LaFroy and Austin must have known.

Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career.

If Tom Lefroyt later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austins and Jane Austin never saw him again.

In November 1798, LaFoy was still on Austin's mind as she wrote to her sister.

She had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.

After finishing Lady Susan Austin began her first fulllength novel, Elinor and Marianne.

Her sister remembered that it was read to the family before 1796 and was told through a series of letters without surviving original manuscripts.

There is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel, published anonymously in 1911.

As since insensibility, Austin began a second novel, First Impressions, later published as Pride and Prejudice.

In 1996.

She completed the initial draft in August 1797, age 21.

As with all of her novels, Austin read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it, and it became an established favorite at this time.

Her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels.

In November 1797, George Austin wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions.

Cadell returned Mr.

Austin's letter, marking it declined by return of post.

Austin may not have known of her father's efforts.

Following the completion of First Impressions, Austin returned to Eleanor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid 1798 revised it heavily.

She eliminated the epistolary format in favor of third person narration and produced something close to sense and sensibility.

In 1797, Austin met her cousin and future sisterinlaw Eliza Defied, a French aristocrat whose first husband, the Count's Defyulde, had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austin.

The description of the execution of the count staff you lied related by his widow, left Austin with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.

During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Eleanor and Marianne, Austin began writing a third novel with the working title Susan, later North Anger Abbey, a satire on the popular Gothic novel.

Austin completed her work about a year later.

In early 18 three Henry Austin offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher who paid £10 for the Copyright.

Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being in the press, but did nothing more.

The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished until Austin repurchased the Copyright from him in 1816.

In December 1800, George Austin unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the Ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to Four Sydney Place in Bath.

While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austin's, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known.

An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer.

During the time she lived at Bath, she was able to make some revisions to Susan and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the year 1795 to 1799.

Tommelin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees.

Arguing Austin wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died.

It is often claimed that Austin was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing.

But it is just as possible that Austin's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels.

The critic Robert Irvine argues that if Austin spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside, as is often argued.

Furthermore, Austin frequently both moved and traveled over Southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel.

Austin sold the rights to publish Susan to a publisher, Crosby and Company, who paid her £10.

The Crosbyan Company advertised Susan but never published it.

The years from 18 or one to 18 and four are something of a blank space for Austin scholars, as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons.

In December 18, two Austin received her only known proposal of marriage.

She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine, Bigg old friends who lived near Baggage Stoke, their younger brother, Harris.

Bigwither has recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home.

Bigwitter proposed and Austin accepted.

As described by Carolyn Austin, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigwither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive.

He was a large, plain looking man who spoke little stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation and almost completely tactless.

However, Austin had known him since both were young, and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austin and her family.

He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up.

With these resources, Austin could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home, and perhaps assist her brothers in their careers.

By the next morning, Austin realized she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.

No contemporary letters or diaries describe how often felt about this proposal.

Irvine described Bigweather as somebody who seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love.

In 1814, Austin wrote a letter to her niece, F**** Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around and entreat you not to commit yourself further and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him.

Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.

The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austin had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife, all of her heroines known in proportion to their maturity.

The meaning of Ardent love, a possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility, occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that the worst and most irremediable bowl of all evils, a connection for life, was an unsuitable man.

In 18 four, while living in Bath, Austin started but did not complete her novel The Watsons.

The story centers on an Invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters.

Sutherland describes the novel as a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives.

Honan suggests, and Tomlin agrees that Austin chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on Jan.

21.

Eight five, and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.

Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation.

Edward, James Henry and Francis Austin, known as Frank, pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters for the next four years.

The family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity.

They spent part of their time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 18 five for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham.

They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing on the Sussex Coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage.

It was here that Austin is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its conclusion in 18 six.

The family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austin and his new wife.

A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.

On April 5, 1909, about three months before the families moved to Chawton, Austin wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby offering him a new manuscript of Susan, if needed, to secure the immediate publication of the novel and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher.

Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time or at all, and that Austin could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher.

She did not have the resources to buy the Copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.

Around early 18.

Nine Austin's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more subtle life, the use of a large cottage in Tatton Village that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chattan House.

Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chattan Cottage on July 718.

Nine life was quieter in Chattan than it had been since the families moved to Bath in 1800.

The Austins did not socialize with Gentry and entertained only when family visited.

Her niece Anna described the family's life in Cha Tin as a very quiet life according to our ideas, but they were great readers and Besides the housekeeping, our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write.

Like many women authors at the time, Austin published her books anonymously at the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded as best as a secondary form of activity.

A woman who wished to be a fulltime writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of parttime job and was not seeking to become a literary Lionesse, I-E-A celebrity.

During her time at Chawton, Austin published four generally wellreceived novels through her brother Henry.

The publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish since Insensibility, which, like all of Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice, was published on Commission, that is, at the author's financial risk.

When publishing on Commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold, and then charge a 10% Commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author.

If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them.

The alternative to selling via Commission was by selling the Copyright, where an author received a onetime payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice.

Austin's experience with Susan, the manuscript that became North Hanger Abbey, where she sold the Copyright to the publisher Crosby and Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the Copyright in order to get her work published left Austin Leery of this method of publishing.

The first alternative of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austin, as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an upcoming book to their friends could sell by subscription.

Since Insensibility appeared in October 18 eleven and was described as being written by a lady.

As it was sold on Commission, Edgerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings.

Reviews were favorable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion makers.

The editions sold out.

By mid 1813, Austin's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period.

The small size of the novel reading public and the large costs associated with hand production, particularly the cost of handmade paper, meant that most novels were published in additions of 500 copies or less to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist.

Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in additions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted.

If demand continued, Austin's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 20 copies of Emma.

It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austin's novels was driven by the publishers or the author.

Since all but one of Austin's books were originally published on Commission, the risks of overproduction were largely hers or Cassandra's after her death, and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk.

Additions of popular works of nonfiction were often much larger.

Austin made £140 from Sentence Sensibility, which provided her with some financial and psychological independence.

After the success of Since Insensibility, all of Austin's subsequent books were billed as written by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and Austin's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime.

Edgerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions.

In January 1813, Austin sold the Copyright to Pride and Prejudice to Edgerton for £110.

To maximize profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings.

He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, gamoring three favorable reviews and selling well.

Had Austin sold Pride and Prejudice on Commission, she would have made a profit of £475 or twice her father's annual income.

By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition.

Mansfield park was published by Egerton in May 1814.

While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers.

All copies were sold within six months, and Austin's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.

Without Austin's knowledge or approval, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced pirated editions in France.

The literary critic Noel King commented in 1953 that given the prevailing rage in France at the time for lush romantic fantasies, it was remarkable that her novels, with the emphasis on everyday English life, had any sort of market in France.

King cautioned that Austin's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montalu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of imitations than translations proper, as Montalu depended upon assistance to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that Austin radically altered Austin's plots and characters.

The first of the Austin novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliott o Lancine inclination, Austin learns that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences.

In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian, James Daniel Clarke, invited Austin to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austin should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince.

Though Austin disapproved of the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request.

Austin disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanizing gambling, drinking, spin, thrift ways, and generally disreputable behavior.

She later wrote Plan of a Novel According to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric outline of the perfect novel based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austin novel.

Austin was greatly annoyed by Clark's often pompous literary advice and the plan of a novel parodying.

Clark was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the Royal Librarian.

In mid 1815, Austin moved her work from Edgerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816.

Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma.

These were the last of Austin's novels to be published during her lifetime.

While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austin began the Elliots, later published as Persuasion.

She completed her first draft in July 1816.

In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austin repurchased the Copyright for Susan From Crosby.

Austin was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family.

Financial Troubles Henry Austin's Bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward James and Frank Austin large sums.

Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.

Austin was feeling unwell by early 1816 but ignored the warning signs.

By the middle of that year her decline was unmistakable and she began a slow, irregular deterioration.

The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and lists her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma.

When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse writing.

I am ashamed to say that the shock of my uncle's will brought on a relapse, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves.

Austin continued to work in spite of her illness.

Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on August 6, 1816.

In January 1817, Austin began The Brothers, titled Sandidon, which published in 1925, completing twelve chapters before stopping work in mid March 1817, probably due to illness.

Todd described Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an energetic Invalid.

In the novel, Austin mocked hypochondriacs, and although she described the heroine as Billias.

Five days after abandoning the novel, she wrote of herself that she was turning every wrong color and living chiefly on the sofa.

She put down her pen on March 18, 1817, making a note of it, Austin made light of her condition, describing it as bile and rheumatism.

As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty waking and lacked energy.

By mid April, she was confined to bed.

In May, Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonizing pain and welcomed death.

Austin died in Winchester on July 18, 1817, at the age of 41.

Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral.

The epitaph, composed by her brother James, praises Austin's personal qualities, expresses hope for her Salvation, and mentions the extraordinary endowments of her mind, but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

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