Jane Austen is one of the most well-known and widely read English novelists of all time. She was born on December 16, 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, in Hampshire, England. Austen’s fascination with words and with the world of stories began early on in her life. In the 1790s, during her adolescence, she started writing her own novels, the first one being Love and Freindship [sic]—a parody of romantic fiction organized as a series of love letters. Between 1811 and 1816, Austen started to anonymously publish her works. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were all published during this time. She started working on Persuasion, her last completed novel, soon after she finished Emma. Northanger Abbey was one of the first novels that Austen completed, but it was published posthumously in 1817. In 1816, at the age of forty-one, Austen became ill with Addison’s disease. She died on July 18, 1817.