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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Jane Austen
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(1775–1817) Novelist who established an influential new tradition in English fiction, through her use of understatement and irony in describing the everyday play of relationships within a small group of people in the leisured middle class. Daughter of a clergyman, she was born in the rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, which remained her home until her father's retirement, when she was 26. The last years of her short life were spent in the house of her brother Edward at Chawton, also in Hampshire (kept now as a museum).
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It was in this family setting that she wrote continuously, from childhood on, using her relations as her enthusiastic public. Several of the finished novels were revisions of earlier books. *Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811 at her own financial risk (she made a profit); it was followed by *Pride and Prejudice (1813), *Mansfield Park (1814), and *Emma (1816). *Northanger Abbey and *Persuasion were published together in 1818, the year after her death from what has been retrospectively diagnosed as Addison's disease.
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