Jane Austen Timeline: A Life in Dates (1775–1817)

Jane Austen lived just under forty-two years and published for only six of them. The timeline below sets her life against her work, and one fact jumps out of it: the novels we think of as her achievement were nearly all written young and published late. The gap between drafting and print — sometimes fifteen years — is the central strangeness of her career.

Early life at Steventon (1775–1801)

Date	Event
16 Dec 1775	Born at Steventon rectory, Hampshire, seventh of eight children of Rev. George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen
5 Apr 1776	Publicly baptised at the Church of St Nicholas, Steventon (a hard winter had delayed it)
1783	Briefly tutored in Oxford and Southampton with her sister Cassandra; falls seriously ill with typhus
1785–86	Attends the Abbey School in Reading with Cassandra — the end of her formal education, aged about 11
c. 1787–93	Writes the comic Juvenilia — parodies and sketches filling three notebooks
1795	Writes Elinor and Marianne, an early version of Sense and Sensibility
1796–97	Writes First Impressions, the draft that becomes Pride and Prejudice; her father offers it to a publisher, who declines it unseen
1798–99	Writes Susan, later revised into Northanger Abbey

Everything in this first period is unpublished. By the time the family left Steventon, Austen had drafted three of her six novels and sold none.

The unsettled years: Bath and Southampton (1801–1809)

Date	Event
1801	Rev. Austen retires; the family moves to Bath. Jane writes little new work
1803	Sells Susan (later Northanger Abbey) to the publisher Crosby & Co. for £10 — who then never prints it
2 Dec 1802	Accepts a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, then withdraws her acceptance the next morning
21 Jan 1805	Her father dies suddenly in Bath, leaving the women with little income
1806	Jane, Cassandra, and their mother move to Southampton to share a house with brother Frank

These are the quiet years. Displaced and financially dependent, Austen produced almost no new fiction between 1801 and 1809 — the gap that makes her later burst of productivity so striking. Where she lived through these moves is traced in where did Jane Austen live?

Chawton and the published novels (1809–1817)

Date	Event
7 Jul 1809	Moves to Chawton Cottage, Hampshire, on brother Edward’s estate — a settled home at last
1809	Writes to Crosby demanding the return of Susan; still unpublished, she buys the manuscript back later
1811	Revises and publishes Sense and Sensibility, “By a Lady,” at her own financial risk
Jan 1813	Publishes Pride and Prejudice, “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility”
1814	Publishes Mansfield Park
Dec 1815	Publishes Emma, dedicated (at his request) to the Prince Regent
1816	Begins to show signs of the illness that will kill her; writes Persuasion
1817	Begins Sanditon in January but abandons it, too ill to continue
May 1817	Moves to 8 College Street, Winchester, to be near her doctor
18 Jul 1817	Dies at Winchester, aged 41; buried in Winchester Cathedral

In eight years at Chawton she published four novels and wrote two more. It is the most concentrated period of her life, and essentially the whole of her public career. How that career ended is covered in how did Jane Austen die?

Publication timeline of the six novels

Novel	Written / drafted	First published	Austen’s age at publication
Sense and Sensibility	1795 → revised 1809–10	1811	35
Pride and Prejudice	1796–97 → revised c. 1811–12	Jan 1813	37
Mansfield Park	1811–13	1814	38
Emma	1814–15	Dec 1815	40
Northanger Abbey	1798–99	1818 (posthumous)	— (died 1817)
Persuasion	1815–16	1818 (posthumous)	— (died 1817)

For the full order and how the novels relate, see Jane Austen’s books in order.

After her death

Date	Event
Dec 1817 / 1818	Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published together in four volumes, dated 1818
1818	Brother Henry’s “Biographical Notice” reveals Jane Austen as the author for the first time
1869–70	Nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh publishes A Memoir of Jane Austen, sparking the wider Victorian revival of her reputation
1872	A brass plaque naming her as a writer is added to her grave in Winchester Cathedral

Austen died famous to almost no one — her novels anonymous, her gravestone silent about them. The reputation that makes her name a household word was built entirely after 1817, first by her family’s memoir and then by a century and a half of readers.

The one-line version

Born at Steventon in 1775; drafted three novels there before she was 24; lost a decade to Bath and Southampton; found a settled home at Chawton in 1809 and published four novels in her last eight years; died at Winchester in 1817 with two more novels unpublished. For the narrative rather than the dates, read who was Jane Austen?