Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, to Rev. George Austen and the former Cassandra Leigh in Steventon, Hampshire, as the seventh of eight children. Like the central characters in most of her novels, the Austens were a large family of respectable lineage but no fortune; her father supplemented his living – his clergymans income – by farming. This lively and cheerful family frequently passed their evenings in novel-reading, charades and amateur theatrics. Among her siblings, her sister Cassandra, three years older, was her lifelong friend and confidant. The abundant correspondence between the sisters provides historians with the greatest insight into Austens past. The only undisputed portrait of Jane Austen is a somewhat rudimentary coloured sketch done by Cassandra, which currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London.In 1783, Austen was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton, and finally in 17851786 attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire. This uncommonly advanced level of education may have contributed to her early proclivity towards writing.Her large family supplied material for the kind of novels popular when she wrote, but she chose not to draw upon any of it: her mother, for example, was related to a Duke who was master of Balliol College, Oxford; one aunt married an admiral; another, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, was falsely imprisoned for petty theft in 1799; a cousin, the Comtesse de Feuillide, fled the Reign of Terror after the execution of her husband, came to live with the Austens at Steventon, later fell in love with and married Janes handsome and cheerful brother Henry, who later went bankrupt and then went into the Anglican priesthood; her brother James married a dukes granddaughter and followed in the path of their father and joined the clergy (the latter towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker); her brothers Frank and Charles (who married the daughter of the Attorney-General of Bermuda) became naval officers, saw action in the Napoleonic wars, and eventually wound up admirals; and her charming and amiable brother Edward was adopted by the first family of Steventon, the Thomas Knights, a wealthy and childless couple. They educated him, sent him on the grand tour, married him to the daughter of a baronet, and made him their heir.
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