December 16, 1775: Jane Austen Is Born

Men have Casablanca, women have Gone with the Wind.

Men have The Godfather, women have The Way We Were.

Men have Cheers, women have The Golden Girls.

Men have Seinfeld, women have Sex and the City.

And men have George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, while women have his contemporary, Jane Austen. And while Lord Byron was a great writer, and genuinely heroic in battle, in private life, as a mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, put it, he was "mad, bad and dangerous to know." Austen was beyond reproach.

She was born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, near the South Coast of England. Her relatives built a legend of "good quiet Aunt Jane," portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life.

Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family."

In 1783, when Jane was 7, she and her sister Cassandra bought caught typhus, and, in those pre-antibiotic days, Jane nearly died from it. After a brief stay at a boarding school in 1785, as a biographer put it, she "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment."

As young as 7, she joined her siblings in local theatrical productions, inspiring her to start writing plays at 12. From 1787 to 1793, she wrote various works that have become known as her Juvenalia. These include a short novel titled Love and Friendship: At age 14, she was already mocking popular works that had come to be known as "novels of sensibility." The next year, she wrote 34 pages titled "The History of England." Though only high school age by modern American standards, Jane Austen already knew her stuff.

During the Christmas season of 1795, shortly after she turned 20, she met Thomas Langlois Lefroy, who was a few days younger. In letters, she referred to him as "my friend," and it is widely believed that he was the basis for the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. They parted after only a few weeks, after which she had already written in a letter, "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea."

She last mentioned him in a letter -- a surviving one, anyway -- in 1798, and never married. Not that she didn't try, and was engaged once, but it seemed no man ever measured up to her first love. He went on to be elected to the British Parliament, and from 1852 to 1866, served as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.

Even if you've never read Jane Austen, you're probably familiar with her work, written in Chawton, also in Hampshire, and mainly set in her own place and time: Regency England, in the period from the 1811 declaration that King George III was now mentally incompetent to reign, giving his son, the dissolute Prince of Wales, the responsibility of a monarch but not the respect of one, until 1820, when George III finally died after 60 years on the throne that included the loss of America but the defeat of Napoleon, and the Prince's accession as King George IV.

Her 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility has been adapted for a 1971 TV-movie, miniseries in 1981 and 2008, a 1995 Emma Thompson film, and a 2024 Hallmark Channel film with a mainly-black cast. The 2006 film Material Girls and the 2011 film From Prada to Nada set the story in present-day Los Angeles, the latter centered around Mexican-Americans.

Her best-known work, the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, has been adapted for a 1938 movie for the BBC, a 1940 film with Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet and Laurence Olivier as "Mr. Darcy," a 1949 TV-movie, a 1952 miniseries, a 1957 Italian miniseries starring Virna Lisi, a 1958 miniseries (yet another that's believed to be lost), a 1967 miniseries, a 1980 miniseries, a 1995 miniseries with Jennifer Ehle that helped launch Colin Firth to stardom, and a 2005 film with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. Oddly, the 1938 British, 1949 British, 1952 British, 1958 British and 1966 Spanish versions are all considered to be lost.

The 2001 film Bridget Jones' Diary is considered to be a present-day version, with Renée Zellweger, and Firth again playing the Darcy equivalent. The 2003 film Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy was set among present-day Mormons in Utah. The 2004 film Bride and Prejudice moved the action to present-day India. The 2019 film Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta gave the story a present-day, mainly-black cast. The 2022 film Fire Island was another up-to-date adaptation, but this time, the characters were gay men at the famous "gay resort" island off the coast of New York's Long Island.

Mansfield Park was published in 1814. It has been filmed for TV miniseries in 1983 and 2007, and as a feature film in 1999. The early 20th Century Jewish-American comedienne Fania Borach may have named herself Fanny Brice in honor of Mansfield Park's heroine, Fanny Price. The 1990 film Metropolitan took the action to present-day New York.

Emma was published in 1815. It has been filmed in 1948 (lost), as a miniseries in 1960 and 1967, for TV in Spain in 1967 and Spain in 1972, a miniseries in 2009, and a feature film in 2020.

In 1995, Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone and set in a Beverly Hills high school, was a present-day version of Emma. Its success inspired a one-season ABC sitcom, with Rachel Blanchard taking over as Emma Woodhouse, and some supporting characters reprising their roles.

Also in 1996, there were competing versions: A feature film with Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma and Jeremy Northam as George Knightley, premiering on August 2; and a TV-movie first broadcast on Britain's ITV on November 24, and on America's A&E on February 16, 1997, with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong. Both were well-received. In 2010, it was adapted in India as Aisha.

In 1799, Austen wrote Northanger Abbey, but it was not published during her lifetime. It has been adapted for Spanish TV in 1968, and British TV in 1997 and 2007 with Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland. The 1993 film Ruby in Paradise, starring Ashley Judd, is considered an adaptation.

In 2009, with Austen's work having long fallen into the public domain, and thus ripe for legal use, Seth Grahame-Smith parodied both Austen and the rise of apocalyptic fiction by publishing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, alternating the original text with new writing about the presence of zombies in Regency England. The absurdity of it all proved so popular, it inspired a film version in 2016, and a quickie companion novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. In 1998, a spoof film was released, titled Jane Austen's Mafia! But the modern controllers of the Austen estate sued, and the film was retitled simply Mafia!

In early 1816, Austen began feeling ill. Speculation as to the nature of her illness include cancer, including Hodgkin's disease, and the adrenal deficiency Addison's disease. She wrote that it was rheumatism, and paid more attention to her work than to her health, but it might not have made a difference.

She finished The Elliots, and began a novel she had titled The Brothers. In this novel, she mocked hypochondriacs, but on March 18, 1817, she made a note in her diary that she could no longer write. On March 23, she wrote that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa."

In May, her sister Cassandra and her brother Henry, themselves renowned as an artist and a clergyman, respectively, brought her to their home in Winchester, also in Hampshire. She was in great pain, and her siblings later reported that she wished for death. It came on July 18, 1817, at the age of 41. Although her sibling had provided her with nieces and nephews, allowing the Austen genetic line to continue, Jane never married, and had no children. Her legacy is as an icon of authorship, perhaps the most beloved female novelist of all time.

In 1818, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published. In 1871, Lady Susan and the never-finished The Watsons were published. In 1925, The Brothers was finally published, under the title Sanditon.

In addition to the films mentioned above, Austen herself has been played by Anne Hathaway in the film Becoming Jane in 2007, and by Patsy Ferran in the miniseries Sanditon in 2023.