Jane Austen
1775 – 1817 · United Kingdom
Known for: Pride and Prejudice, the sharpest pen in English literature
“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
Biography
She published anonymously, "By a Lady", and lived her whole life in the drawing rooms she dissected so precisely. From a rectory in Hampshire, Jane Austen wrote six novels that seem to be about marriage and manners and are actually about money, power, self-deception and the terrifying economics of being a woman with no property and a sharp mind.
She earned little, died at 41 of an illness never diagnosed, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral under a stone that never mentions she wrote. Two centuries later she outsells almost everyone who ever ignored her: adapted, quoted, and read on every continent, literature's quietest revolutionary.