Jane Austen

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 22 2008 15.39 BST

Photograph: Hulton Getty

1775-1817

"I am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming."

Birthplace

Hampshire, England

Education

Private tutoring; boarding school. Her father encouraged her in her education and literary ambition.

Did you know?

Love and Freindship, written at 14, (an epistolary send-up of the cult of sensibility), takes its name from a very un-Austen-like phenomenon: a spelling mistake. At 15 she produced A History of England ("by a partial, ignorant and prejudiced historian").

Critical verdict

Critically well received from publication on (Walter Scott articulated the enduring perception of her "exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting"), her fans are passionately committed to an oeuvre which, maybe more than any other, bears repeated reading. Some dissenters, such as Charlotte Brontë, have found her cold and limited.

Recommended works

Pride and Prejudice has become the archetypal text; Persuasion, with its dual ending, is her last and most subtle work.

Influences

· Dr Samuel Johnson
· Fanny Burney
· Maria Edgeworth
· George Crabbe (her favourite poet)

Now read on

George Eliot and Henry James share something of the Austen sensibility. Try the epistolary novel Lady Susan, written before 1805 but not published until 1871, for Austen's take on decadent London: Less Than Zero meets How To Marry A Millionaire.

Adaptations

Sense and Sensibility (1995, dir Ang Lee), adapted by and starring Emma Thompson featured an over-bubbly Kate Winslet and typically stuttering Hugh Grant. Emma (1996, dir and adapted by Douglas McGrath), cast Gwyneth Paltrow as a suitably giggly if rather unvicious Emma. Persuasion (1995, dir Roger Michell), adapted by Nick Dear, featured a strong British cast. In Pride and Prejudice (1940, dir Robert Z Leonard), adapted by Aldous Huxley, Laurence Olivier is perhaps the perfect Mr Darcy, with a shirt even more billowing than Colin Firth's. Check out Clueless (1995, dir Amy Heckerling), for an updated Los Angeles Emma who's moved on from Box Hill picnics to designer boutiques.

Recommended biography

A Memoir by Edward Austen-Leigh (1870) is the first - and classic - biographical text. Her letters to her sister Cassandra, though censored after her death, combine literary elegance with occasional coarse barbs.

Criticism

Letters To Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen, by Fay Weldon, is written to a reluctant teenager forced (as we all are) to read Austen at school, is passionate and insightful.