Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire in 1775 and died at Winchester in 1817, having published four novels anonymously in her lifetime and two more posthumously. Long before any of them she filled three manuscript notebooks with burlesques, mock-histories and unfinished stories, written between roughly 1787 and 1793 — work she never prepared for publication and which the reading public did not see for a century or more. Catharine, or the Bower belongs to the last of those notebooks. It matters here because the juvenilia is the least-read part of her output and the easiest for a quotation to escape from: the sentence is unmistakably hers, but it was written by a sixteen-year-old and given to a character, which is not what a caption crediting “Jane Austen” usually implies.