Literary and cultural legacy of Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in Steventon Rectory in Basingstoke, Hampshire on 16th December 1775, making December 2025 the 250th anniversary of her birth. She was the daughter of a Church of England clergyman, and one of eight children (six boys and two girls).

In Steventon, between 1795 and 1799, Austen wrote the first drafts of her novels ‘Elinor and Marianne’, ‘First Impressions’, and ‘Susan’, which would later become ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and ‘Northanger Abbey’, respectively.

Austen moved to Bath, Somerset with her family in 1801 at the age of 25, where she stayed until her father’s death in 1805. She briefly moved to Southampton with her sister, Cassandra and mother to live with her brother, Frank. In 1809, the family moved into Chawton Cottage (in Chawton, Hampshire) on her brother Edward’s estate. It is here that she wrote and revised all six of her novels, and published four.

She remained in Chawton for eight years, until she became ill in April 1817. She was moved to Winchester for medical treatment, where shortly after on 18 July 1817, she died at the age of 41. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral on 24 July 1817.

Austen published four novels in her lifetime, all of which were published anonymously at the time of publication, with her first novel’s title page stating written “By a Lady”:

• Sense and Sensibility (1811)
• Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Mansfield Park (1814)
• Emma (1815)

Two further complete novels, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’, were published posthumously in 1817, at the direction of her brother and sister, Henry and Cassandra. These two novels were the first works to be published under Austen’s name at the time of publication, and additionally identified her as the author of her four previous works.

Jane Austen is widely considered one of Britain’s greatest authors. As the Jane Austen’s House website states:

Jane Austen is one of the most famous and beloved writers in the canon of English literature, thought by many to be second only to Shakespeare. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in 1870: ‘Miss Austen understood the smallness of life to perfection. She was a great artist, equal in her small sphere to Shakespeare…’

More recently, Austen critic John Mullan declared that Shakespeare and Dickens are ‘the only other English writers who can rival her continuing international appeal’ (‘What Matters in Jane Austen?’ 2012).

Today, 200 years after her death, Jane Austen’s six completed novels – ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’, and ‘Persuasion’ – are known and loved around the world. They have been translated into dozens of languages and are regularly adapted for film, TV and theatre. They have spawned sequels, prequels and spin offs, and there are countless festivals, clubs and societies in her honour.

Her name is a byword for wit, social observation and insight into the lives of women in the early 19th century. She is celebrated as a social observer, a moralist, a comic genius, and as a popular and universal writer. It’s all quite an achievement for the younger daughter of a country Rector who completed her formal education at the age of eleven and was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime.

Despite only earning an estimated £631 from writing in her lifetime (the equivalent of approximately £45,000 in 2019), Jane Austen's books have gone on to inspire a wide range of film and TV adaptations, have been translated into over 40 languages, and an estimated 78,000+ copies of her novels were reported to have sold in the first 28 weeks of 2025. A recent BBC article exploring ‘Pride and Prejudice’ stated that 250 years since her birth, “the hashtag #prideandprejudice has more than 200,000 posts on TikTok”.

In 2017, the Bank of England issued a £10 banknote featuring a portrait of Jane Austen, based on a sketch drawn by her sister, Cassandra, in 1810. The banknote was unveiled in Winchester Cathedral on the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death.

A number of museums and houses of significance to Jane Austen and her works are open to the public, attracting thousands of visitors every year (PDF) to areas in Derbyshire, Cheshire, Steventon, Bath, Chawton, and Winchester.

There are several statues of Jane Austen in the UK, including a statue outside the Willis Museum in Basingstoke (unveiled on 18 July 2017) and a statue in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral (unveiled on 16 October 2025, to mark the 250th anniversary of her birth).

In 2014, Jane Austen’s fifth great niece, Caroline Jane Knight, established the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation. The foundation is a non-profit with the goal of promoting literacy around the world.

Jane Austen’s name has been mentioned 110 times in parliamentary questions, members’ contributions, and early day motions since April 2000. This includes a number of instances where well-known quotes from her works have been mentioned or paraphrased, in particular, the famous opening line of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

Hansard material referring to Jane Austen is available from this link to the parliamentary database (please note, this requires a parliamentary login).