Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist, born in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh child of a country clergyman. Educated largely at home in a family that read and staged theatricals together, she wrote comic juvenilia from her early teens and completed first versions of her major novels in her twenties. After years of publishers' indifference — one bought Northanger Abbey's manuscript and shelved it — Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, followed by Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815), all published anonymously as by 'a Lady'. She died at forty-one in Winchester, probably of Addison's disease or lymphoma; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously in 1817. Little noticed in her lifetime, she is now regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, her six completed novels continuously in print for two centuries and the foundation of the modern romance genre's central structures.