Jane Austen

Jane Austen is a British novelist. Her five major works interpret and comment on the lives of British landowners and squires at the end of the 18th century. Her second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, was her most critically acclaimed work during her lifetime. The plots in her novels often reflect women's reliance on marriage in pursuit of social status and economic security. Her work criticized the sensual novels of the second half of the eighteenth century, and her novels were part of the nineteenth-century shift to realism.