AUSTEN, JANE

   a gifted English novelist, daughter of a clergyman in N. Hampshire; member of a quiet family circle, occupied herself in writing without eye to publication, and only in mature womanhood thought of writing for the press. Her first novel, "Sense and Sensibility," was published in 1811, and was followed by "Pride and Prejudice," her masterpiece, "Persuasion," and others, her interest being throughout in ordinary quiet cultured life, and the delineation of it, which she achieved in an inimitably charming manner. "She showed once for all," says Professor Saintsbury, "the capabilities of the very commonest and most ordinary life, if sufficiently observed and selected, and combined with due art, to furnish forth prose fiction not merely that would pass, but that should be of the absolutely first quality as literature. She is the mother of the English 19th-century novel, as Scott is the father of it" (1775-1816).