Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose work is set among the landed gentry of Regency England. Writing from a Hampshire rectory family, she published four novels anonymously in her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815); Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared after her death in 1817. Her irony, free indirect speech and close attention to manners and marriage as economic questions made her one of the most widely read novelists in English.