Quiz: Jane Austen

1. Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 in Hampshire, England to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Austen.

The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen

2. Jane Austen had seven other children -- from oldest to youngest they are: James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Frank and Charles.

3. Jane Austen's short works were called "juvenilia". According to Wiki, it is a term "applied to literary, musical or artistic works produced by an author during his or her youth." Three volumes of Jane's juvenilia have survived and been put into book form.

4. Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen's first published novel. It was published at a cost to the author in 1811.

5. Jane Austen used the pseudonym "a Lady". During the early 1800s it was assumed, often wrongly, that if you were a woman writer that you had no other means of support.

6. Six of Jane Austen's novels were published: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

7. Jane Austen never married.

8. Jane Austen spent the last three weeks of her life with her sister Cassandra in Winchester, England in their home on College Street.

9. Jane Austen was forty-one when she died on July 18, 1817. It is suspected that she died at such an early age because she had Addison's Disease, a disorder that affects the endocrine system.

10. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published after Jane Austen's death in 1817. This was the first time she was publicly acknowledged as an author.