Although she joked to her sister Cassandra, in a letter of 1813, "I do not despair of having my picture in the Exhibition at last--all white & red, with my Head on one Side," Jane Austen (1775-1817) avoided the limelight.

The unmarried younger daughter of a country vicar, she published her novels anonymously. When she died, aged only 41--having earned less than 700 from her writing--her name was still almost unknown to the world at large. That two centuries after her death she should be one of the best-known and best-loved authors in the English language is one of history's greater ironies.

Divided into three main sections, this book opens with Jane's early years at Steventon Rectory, Hampshire, before tracing her creatively challenging time in Bath prior to settling at Chawton Cottage a decade later.

The final section examines Jane's emergence as a professional author, with the publication in 1811 of Sense and Sensibility and subsequent modest but growing success with Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), before her untimely death in 1817, which left Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both 1817) to be published posthumously--revealing, at last, her name to the public.