Jane Austen was born in the quiet countryside of Hampshire, England in 1775. The seventh of eight children, Austen and her siblings were homeschooled, and her writing was encouraged by her family in that setting — her siblings providing a rapt audience for the plays, verses and short stories she produced. By age 11, Austen had already penned Elinor and Marianne, a novel-in-letters which would later become one of her most notable works Sense and Sensibility (1811).In this, her first published novel, we already see Austen adopting Free Indirect Discourse (FID), a style she used to skilfully surface the inner thoughts and emotions of her heroines. FID was by then an established literary device in which the novel’s third person narrator adopts the voice of a character whilst remaining at an observational distance. In chapter 43, we become privy to Elinor’s thoughts as she waits anxiously by her sick sister’s bedside, awaiting Colonel Brandon who has gone to fetch their mother:At ten o'clock, she trusted, or at least not much later, her mother would be relieved from the dreadful suspense in which she must now be travelling towards them. The Colonel, too! — perhaps scarcely less an object of pity! — Oh! — how slow was the progress of time which yet kept them in ignorance!1Elinor’s inner turmoil is manifested as feverish exclamations of her own voice but related instead by the narrator.Austen was one of the first writers to use FID consistently in her stories, using it to create her unique flavour of humour, irony and satire. In her second novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813), the narrator adopts Elizabeth’s voice to ridicule the awkward Mr Collins, when she learns she is going to have to dance with him: Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully proposed being engaged by Mr. Wickham for those very dances; and to have Mr. Collins instead! her liveliness had never been worse timed.2Amidst the tide of adventure stories and gothic novels popular at the time, Austen wrote realistic stories grounded in everyday life, often referring to places and events familiar to contemporary readers. In Emma (1815), she weaves in references to the 1801 Union between Britain and Ireland and the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, as Mrs Elton remarks, Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.3After her brother Henry’s Biographical Notice (a preface printed on her later novels) described her as having lived ‘not by any means a life of event’4, an image of Austen as a sheltered and demure woman prevailed. However, her personal correspondence and her critical awareness of contemporary events demonstrate what fellow novelist Walter Scott referred to as a ‘knowledge of the world’5. In his 1815 review of Emma, Scott commended Austen for ‘keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life’6 — a testament to Austen’s great skill for steeping her characters and their predicaments in the social milieu of 19th-century England. Henry Austen’s Notice also summarises Jane’s life as one of ‘usefulness, literature, and religion’7. However, despite being the daughter of a clergyman and the parish being central to social life, there is very little religion in Austen’s novels. When faced with the evangelical revival of the early 19th century, however, we find Austen writing a ‘defence of [her] beleaguered society and its religion’8. In Mansfield Park (1814), Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price represent the orthodox attitudes favoured by Austen ‘in praise of manners, charm, and the formal social occasion, for none of which the Evangelicals had much regard.’9Elsewhere, Austen offers astute insights and biting commentary of her society, suggestive of a sensitive understanding of human nature borne from life experiences. She comments on the ‘manoeuvring business’10 of marriage with a critical eye, a subject she revisits frequently. In her final two novels Persuasion (1817) and Northanger Abbey (1817), Austen also challenges ideas surrounding class and money.Austen’s particular style of realism contributed to what is now known as Social Realism, an approach which transformed readers’ expectations of the novel and also proved inspirational to later writers such as George Elliot and Charles Dickens.11Perhaps the most unique element of Austen’s life was the way in which she managed to transform her writing into a successful career. For women of her time, working and earning money was out of the ordinary; a woman’s role was in the home, and, like her heroines, Austen would have been expected to marry and raise a family. However, in 1802, Austen rejected her only marriage proposal (from a certain Harris Bigg-Wither) and instead dedicated her life to her writing. This decision ultimately enabled Austen to secure her position as one of Western literature’s most renowned writers.