JANE AUSTEN was born on December 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children-six boys and two girls. Jane Austen began to write stories and sketches for her family at the age of 12. By 1795 she had written a comic History of the World; an unfinished novel, Catherine; and two epistolary novels, Lady Susan and Elinor and Marianne which she was later to rewrite as Sense and Sensibility. In 1807 she and her sister and mother moved to Southampton, a large seaport, and in 1809 back to Hampshire to the village of Chawton. It was at Chawton Cottage that she wrote most of her completed novels. In November 1811 her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, appeared and was very successful. Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813, Mansfield Park in May 1814 and Emma very early in 1816. She died in 1817,aged only 42.