In her lifetime Austen’s novels were not widely known, nevertheless some elite readers of high society were familiar with her writings. It was only after her death, especially after the publication of her biography by her nephew James Austen-Leigh in 1870, that she received more widespread recognition. As a young girl she wrote parodies and short burlesques of popular plays and novels for the entertainment of her family. In her early twenties she began to draft, probably in epistolary form, three of the novels which were published only much later and after considerable revision. After her father’s retirement from the post of rector of Steventon (where Austen was born in 1775), the family had to move to Bath, a town which she heartily disliked. With the death of her clergyman father in 1805 Jane, her beloved sister, Cassandra, and their mother lived in reduced circumstances, depending on the financial support of the Austen brothers. These years have baffled critics and biographers: it seems that the move from Steventon to Bath silenced Austen’s creative powers until Edward Knight (one of Austen’s older brothers) was able to settle his mother and sisters in a cottage on his inherited estate at Chawton in Hampshire. Jane Austen was delighted with Chawton Cottage, and there she began revising and completing the novels she wrote earlier. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published anonymously in 1811. Then followed Pride and Prejudice in 1813 with reasonable success. Mansfield Park was published in 1814 and Emma (with a dedication to the Prince Regent) one year later. Northanger Abbey might also have been one of her earliest works, but it was published posthumously together with her last completed novel Persuasion in 1818, one year after Austen’s death.