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Jane Austen

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.

The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), were a modest success but brought her little fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1817—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons.

Since her death Austen's novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series (illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering and sold as a set). They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship.

Biographical sources

The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her. Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published. Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them. She wanted to ensure that the "younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny.

The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 "Biographical Notice". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters. Austen's family and relatives built a legend of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life. Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family".

Family
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775 in a harsh winter. Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that the newborn infant was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.

Her father, George Austen (1731–1805), served as the rector of the Anglican parishes of Steventon and Deane. The Reverend Austen came from an old and wealthy family of wool merchants. As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children, and had to be taken in by relatives. In 1745, at the age of fifteen, George Austen's sister Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. At the age of sixteen, George entered St John's College, Oxford, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She came from the prominent Leigh family. Her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.

George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were engaged, probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures. He received the living of the Steventon parish from Thomas Knight, the wealthy husband of his second cousin. They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by license, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death.

After the living at the nearby Deane rectory had been purchased for George by his wealthy uncle Francis Austen, the Austens took up temporary residence there, until Steventon rectory, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.

Steventon

In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.

According to biographer Park Honan, the atmosphere of the Austen home was an "open, amused, easy intellectual" one, where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.

The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. Mrs Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."

Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents upon her return, "... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it." Le Faye writes that "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."

From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. The Reverend Austen had an annual income of £200 from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000. Mr. Austen also rented the 200-acre Cheesedown farm from his benefactor Thomas Knight which could make a profit of £300 a year.

During this period of her life, Jane Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".

Education

In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them to Southampton later that year. That autumn both girls were sent home after catching typhus, from which Jane Austen nearly died. She was from then home-educated, until she attended boarding school with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle. The curriculum probably included French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music and drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".

Her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins said that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys". Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.

Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.

Juvenilia (1787–1793)
From at least the time she was aged eleven, Austen wrote poems and stories to amuse herself and her family. She exaggerated mundane details of daily life and parodied common plot devices in "stories [] full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd. Containing work written between 1787 and 1793, the juvenilia (or childhood writings) that Austen compiled fair copies consisted of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia. She called the three notebooks "Volume the First", "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.

Among these works is a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship [sic], written when aged fourteen in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility. The next year, she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. When she was around eighteen years old, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.

In August 1792, aged seventeen, Austen started Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey, but was left unfinished until picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine. A year later she began, but abandoned, a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.

When Austen became an aunt for the first time aged eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny Catherine Austen Knight "five short pieces of ... the Juvenilia now known collectively as 'Scraps' .., purporting to be her 'Opinions and Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women. For Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen (also born in 1793), her aunt wrote "two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June 1793, 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811 (when she was 36), and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.

Between 1793 and 1795 (aged eighteen to twenty), Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:

Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.

According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.

Tom Lefroy

When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."

Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".

Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.

Early manuscripts (1796–1798)
After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.

During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.

Bath and Southampton

In December 1800, George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath, Somerset. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving 50 mi away from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived in Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels. The critic Robert Irvine argued that if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen frequently both moved and travelled over southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights to publish Susan to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid her £10. The Crosby & Company advertised Susan, but never published it.

The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802, Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine described Bigg-Wither as somebody who "...seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love".

In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love". A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates "the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life" with an unsuitable man.

In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.

Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its "Conclusion". In 1806, the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.

On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.

Chawton

Around early 1809, Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village which was part of the estate around Edward's nearby property Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."

Published author
Like many women authors at the time, Austen published her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literary lioness" (i.e. a celebrity).

During her time at Chawton, Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which, like all of Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice, was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via commission was by selling the copyright, where an author received a one-time payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice. Austen's experience with Susan (the manuscript that became Northanger Abbey) where she sold the copyright to the publisher Crosby & Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the copyright in order to get her work published, left Austen leery of this method of publishing. The final alternative, of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austen as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an up-coming book to their friends, could sell by subscription. Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, and was described as being written "By a Lady". As it was sold on commission, Egerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings.

Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or fewer to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2,000 copies of Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published "on commission", the risks of overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her death) and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger.

Austen made £140 from Sense and Sensibility, which provided her with some financial and psychological independence. After the success of Sense and Sensibility, all of Austen's subsequent books were billed as written "By the author of Sense and Sensibility" and Austen's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime. Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for £110. To maximise profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. Had Austen sold Pride and Prejudice on commission, she would have made a profit of £475, or twice her father's annual income. By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.

Without Austen's knowledge or approval, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France. The literary critic Noel King commented in 1953 that, given the prevailing rage in France at the time for lush romantic fantasies, it was remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France. King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of "imitations" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination.

Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the Plan of a Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.

In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.

While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.

Illness and death
Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing: "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves."

Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), completing twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel Austen mocked hypochondriacs, and although she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.

Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May, Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

Posthumous publication
In the months after Austen's death in July 1817, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note dated December 1817, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.

Although Austen's six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still being read through copies housed in private libraries and circulating libraries. Austen had early admirers. The first piece of fiction using her as a character (what might now be called real person fiction) appeared in 1823 in a letter to the editor in The Lady's Magazine. It refers to Austen's genius and suggests that aspiring authors were envious of her powers.

In 1832, Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.

Genre and style
Austen's works implicitly critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen repudiated, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of manners". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".

Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her relationship with these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more." She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's "novel-fueled" desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."

Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.

Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles: "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:

 From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.

Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".

Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good."

Contemporaneous responses
As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious, most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.

Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of Emma in 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel and praising Austen's realism, "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him". The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.

19th century

Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", some 19th-century critics preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Notwithstanding Walter Scott's positivity, Austen's work did not win over those who preferred the prevailing aesthetic values of the elite Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold steadily. Austen's six books were included in the canon-making Standard Novels series by publisher Richard Bentley, which increased their stature. That series referred to her as "the founder of a school of novelists" and called her a genius.

The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no substance. Austen was not widely appreciated in France until 1878, when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the first French author to do so. The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Morland.

In Britain and North America, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of both the public and the literati. In the United States, Austen was being recommended as reading in schools as early as 1838, according to Professor Devoney Looser. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century, novelist Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".

The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen's life story to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred another reissue of Austen's novels. Editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the start of the 20th century, an intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of Austen, distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm of the masses.

In response, Henry James decried "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the "anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relatively untouched".

Modern

Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.

With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles analyzed the books Austen read and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's style and "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has continued since.

The period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time.

In the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were regarded as too frivolous, and thus during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist". In the late 1970s, when Austen's works was re-published in China, her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.

In a typical modern debate, the conservative American professor Gene Koppel, to the indignation of his liberal literature students, mentioned that Austen and her family were "Tories of the deepest dye", i.e. Conservatives in opposition to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel argued that different people react to a work of literature in different subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid, provided they are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency-era society and as a conservative upholding its values.

Adaptations
Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations released in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, class is subtly downplayed, and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.

From 1995, many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and in 2016 by Love & Friendship starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of Lady Susan, that borrowed the title of Austen's Love and Freindship [sic].

Honours
In 2013, Austen's works featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the bicentenary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen is on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was introduced in 2017, replacing Charles Darwin. In July 2017, a statue of Jane Austen was erected in Basingstoke, Hampshire on the 200th anniversary of her death.

List of works
Novels Unfinished fiction Other works
 * Sense and Sensibility (1811)
 * Pride and Prejudice (1813)
 * Mansfield Park (1814)
 * Emma (1816)
 * Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous)
 * Persuasion (1818, posthumous)
 * Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)
 * The Watsons (1804)
 * Sanditon (1817)
 * Sir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800)
 * Plan of a Novel (1815)
 * Poems (1796–1817)
 * Prayers (1796–1817)
 * Letters (1796–1817)

Juvenilia—Volume the First (1787–1793)
 * Frederic & Elfrida
 * Jack & Alice
 * Edgar & Emma
 * Henry and Eliza
 * The Adventures of Mr. Harley
 * Sir William Mountague
 * Memoirs of Mr. Clifford
 * The Beautifull Cassandra [sic]
 * Amelia Webster
 * The Visit
 * The Mystery
 * The Three Sisters
 * A Fragment
 * A beautiful description
 * The generous Curate
 * Ode to Pity

Juvenilia—Volume the Second (1787–1793) Juvenilia—Volume the Third (1787–1793)
 * Love and Freindship [sic]
 * Lesley Castle
 * The History of England
 * A Collection of Letters
 * The female philosopher
 * The first Act of a Comedy
 * A Letter from a Young Lady
 * A Tour through Wales
 * A Tale
 * Evelyn
 * Catharine, or The Bower

Museums

 * Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton
 * The Jane Austen Centre in Bath

Fan sites and societies

 * The Republic of Pemberley
 * The Jane Austen Society of Australia
 * The Jane Austen Society of North America
 * The Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Jane Austen


text:
Talk:Jane Austen

Semi-protected edit request on 8 December 2023
Mentioned year is wrong, both were published in 1817.

"She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion." Adocys (talk) 22:37, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ RudolfRed (talk) 00:46, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 January 2024
Michael D Sanders and Elizabeth M Graham propose systemic lupus erythematosus as a probable cause of Austen's illness and death.

‘Black and white and every wrong colour’: The medical history of Jane Austen and the possibility of systemic lupus erythematosus

Michael D Sanders and Elizabeth M Graham

file:///E:/Documents/18th%20-%2019th%20CENTURY%20CULTURE/TIPS,%20ARTICLES%20&%20MISCELLANEOUS/Black%20and%20White%20and%20Every%20Wrong%20Colour.pdf 92.28.205.135 (talk) 15:04, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

 * This 2021 paper? aka Lupus. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:20, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Geardona (talk to me?) 23:39, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Marriage
Austen editors might like to keep an eye on a long-term slow-motion edit war, on-going since 2022, about another article saying Austen was married in Scotland in September 1789. Uncle G (talk) 02:29, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Special:Diff/1208597370
 * Special:Diff/1102820283
 * Special:Diff/950880377
 * Special:Diff/950880377

title: Talk:Jane Austen


text:
Talk:John Stuart Mill

Women's suffrage?
"In 1866, he became the first person in the history of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate." This contradicts the assertion in the opening paragraph that he was the second. Which is correct? RyanCarey1 (talk) 18:39, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Help: prank text removed; hoping someone can reinsert corrected sentence
The following was in the text as I read it before making a change:

He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on tiktok videos, notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell.

I removed everything after scientific methodology - I suspect most of the rest of the sentence has valuable information, but I don't know how to correctly adjust or contextualize it. It would be ideal if someone with the right background could correct and reinsert it. Here's the original version with the proper formatting:

He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on tiktok videos, notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell. Galutnik (talk) 16:35, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

 * Someone has apparently fixed it since I wrote this. Thank you! Galutnik (talk) 16:37, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:John Stuart Mill


text:
June

June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars—the latter the most widely used calendar in the world. June is 30 days long, and comes after May and before July. June marks the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and contains the summer solstice, the day with the most daylight hours. In the Southern Hemisphere, June is the start of winter and contains the winter solstice, the day with the fewest hours of daylight out of the year.

The Atlantic hurricane season—when tropical or subtropical cyclones are most likely to form in the north Atlantic Ocean—begins on 1 June and lasts until 30 November. The East Asian rainy season is also generally considered to commence during this month. Multiple meteor showers occur annually in June, including the Arietids, which are among the most intense daylight meteor showers of the year, and last between 22 May and 2 July, peaking in intensity on 8 June.

Numerous observances take place in June. Midsummer, the celebration of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, commences in several countries. In Catholicism, this month is dedicated to the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and known as the Month of the Sacred Heart. The most well-known month-long observance in the United States in June is Pride Month, which is the celebration of LGBT individuals and the advancement of their civil liberties.

Overview
June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars—the latter the most widely used calendar in the world. Containing 30 days, June succeeds May and precedes July. It is one of four months to contain 30 days, alongside April, September and November; herein June lies between April, the fourth month of the year, and September—the ninth month of the year. June is abbreviated as Jun, and may be spelled with or without a concluding period (full stop).

Etymologically, June is ultimately derived from the Latin month of Iunius, named after the ancient Roman goddess Juno (Latin: Iūnō). The name June entered English in the 13th century via the Anglo-Norman join, junye and junie. It was also written in Middle English as Iun and Juin, while the spelling variant Iune was in use until the 17th century.

History
June originates from the month of Iunius (also called mensis Iunius) in the original Roman calendar used during the Roman Republic. The origin of this calendar is obscure. Iunius, originally the fourth month, had 29 days alongside Aprilis ("April"), Sextilis (later renamed Augustus "August"), September, November and December. It is unclear when the Romans reset the course of the year so that Ianuarius ("January") and Februarius ("February") came first—thus moving Iunius to the sixth month of the year—but later Roman scholars generally dated this to 153 BC. In ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June may have been considered inauspicious for marriages. The Roman poet Ovid claimed to have consulted the flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of the god Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, but was advised to wait until after 15 June. The Greek philosopher and writer Plutarch, however, implied that the entire month of June was more favorable for weddings than May.

In 46 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, which thus became known as the Julian calendar after himself. This reform fixed the calendar to 365 days with a leap year every fourth year, and made June 30 days long; however, this reform resulted in the average year of the Julian calendar being 365.25 days long, slightly more than the actual solar year of 365.2422 days (the current value, which varies). In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a revised calendar—the Gregorian calendar—that reduced the average length of the calendar year from 365.25 days to 365.2425, correcting the Julian calendar's drift against the solar year.

Climate, daylight and astronomy
In the Northern Hemisphere, June marks the commencement of summer, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the start of winter. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the traditional astronomical summer is 21 June, while meteorological summer commences on 1 June. In the Southern Hemisphere, astronomical winter starts on 21 June while meteorological winter begins on 1 June. The June solstice—known as the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere—occurs for one-day between 20–22 June (often on 21 June), marking the longest day of the year in terms of daylight hours in the Northern Hemisphere and the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. In places north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle, this is when the midnight sun occurs, during which the Sun remains visible even at midnight.

The Atlantic hurricane season—when tropical or subtropical cyclones are most likely to form in the north Atlantic Ocean—begins on 1 June, lasting until 30 November. In the Indian Ocean north of the equator, around the Indian subcontinent, year-round tropical cyclones appear frequently between May and June. In contrast, Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones are least likely to form in June because of the dry season of the Mediterranean having stable air. The East Asian rainy season is generally considered to commence in June. Certain meteor showers occur annually during this month. The Arietids—among the most intense daylight meteor showers of the year—last from 22 May until 2 July, peaking on 8 June; the Beta Taurids take place between 5 June and 18 July, peaking on 28 June; and the June Bootids commence between 22 June and 2 July, peaking on 27 June.

Observances
In Catholicism, June is dedicated to the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This observance is called the Month of the Sacred Heart. In Canada, June is ALS Awareness Month, a campaign to spread awareness and raise funds for a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Filipino Heritage Month. In the United States, the National Safety Council established June as National Safety Month, a month-long observance with the general aim of increasing awareness by individuals and organizations of the leading safety and health risks and ultimately decreasing the number of unintentional injuries and deaths throughout the country. In the United States in June is Pride Month, which is the celebration of LGBT individuals and the advancement of their civil liberties. Caribbean-American Heritage Month also occurs annually in June. National Smile Month, the largest oral health campaign in the United Kingdom and organised by the Oral Health Foundation, commences between alternating dates from mid-May to mid-June. In Barbados, June is part of the Season of Emancipation which takes place between 14 April and 23 August to commemorate the emancipation of slaves of African descent.

Global single-day observances
Noteworthy international holidays include:

 * Fixed

 * 1 June: International Children's Day and World Milk Day
 * 2 June: International Whores' Day
 * 4 June: 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre anniversary commemorations
 * 15 June: Global Wind Day
 * 16 June: International Day of the African Child
 * 18 June: Autistic Pride Day
 * 19 June: World Sauntering Day
 * 21 June: Go Skateboarding Day; Midsummer; World Hydrography Day; World Music Day
 * 25 June: World Vitiligo Day
 * 26 June: World Refrigeration Day

 * Movable
 * First Wednesday: Global Running Day
 * Third Saturday: International Surfing Day
 * Third Sunday: Father's Day
 * Varies: King's Official Birthday

United Nations
The following are global holidays which are formally observed by the United Nations:

 * 1 June: Global Day of Parents
 * 3 June: World Bicycle Day
 * 4 June: International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression
 * 5 June: World Environment Day and International Day for the Fight Against Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing
 * 6 June: D-Day
 * 7 June: World Food Safety Day
 * 8 June: World Oceans Day
 * 12 June: World Day Against Child Labour
 * 13 June: International Albinism Awareness Day
 * 14 June: World Blood Donor Day
 * 15 June: World Elder Abuse Awareness Day
 * 16 June: International Day of Family Remittances
 * 17 June: World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought
 * 18 June: International Day for Countering Hate Speech and Sustainable Gastronomy Day
 * 19 June: International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict
 * 20 June: World Refugee Day
 * 21 June: International Day of Yoga
 * 23 June: United Nations Public Service Day and International Widows' Day
 * 24 June: International Day of Women in Diplomacy
 * 25 June: Day of the Seafarer
 * 26 June: International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking and International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
 * 27 June: Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Day
 * 29 June: International Day of the Tropics
 * 30 June: International Asteroid Day and International Day of Parliamentarism

Religious observances
As Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after 21 March (a fixed approximation of the March equinox), Ascension Day, observed 39 days after Easter, can occur in June. Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday, while Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost. The Catholic Church also observes the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which happens on the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost. The Feast of Corpus Christi, observed by the Latin Church and certain Western Orthodox, Lutheran, and Anglican churches, takes place on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. The feast of Saints Peter and Paul, a liturgical feast observed by numerous denominations, always occurs on 29 June.

In Buddhism, Vesak (Buddha Day), the most significant Buddhist festival, occurs on 2 June in Singapore and on 3 June in Thailand as of 2024. Shavuot, one of the biblically-ordained Three Pilgrimage Festivals observed in Judaism, takes place during the month of Sivan in the Hebrew calendar, which corresponds to being between May and June in the Gregorian calendar.

Symbols
In astrology, the Zodiac signs for those born between 21 May and 21 June is Gemini. For people born between 22 June and 22 July, their sign is Cancer. The birthstones associated with June in the United States are pearl, moonstone and alexandrite. The birth flowers of June are rose and honeysuckle.

title: June


text:
July

July is the seventh month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Its length is 31 days. It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., being the month of his birth. Before then it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the calendar that started with March.

It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer, and the coldest month in much of the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of winter. The second half of the year commences in July. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is the seasonal equivalent of January in the Northern hemisphere.

"Dog days" are considered to begin in early July in the Northern Hemisphere, when the hot sultry weather of summer usually starts. Spring lambs born in late winter or early spring are usually sold before 1 July.

Symbols
July's birthstone is the ruby, which symbolizes contentment. Its birth flowers are the larkspur and the water lily. The zodiac signs are Cancer (until July 22) and Leo (July 23 onward).

Observances
This list does not necessarily imply either official status nor general observance.
 * Season of Emancipation 14 April to 23 August (Barbados)
 * Honor America Days: 14 June to 4 July (United States)

Month-long

 * In Catholic tradition, July is the Month of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus.
 * National Hot Dog Month (United States)
 * National Ice Cream Month (United States)
 * Disability Pride Month (United States)

Non-Gregorian
(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown before the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)
 * List of observances set by the Bahá'í calendar
 * List of observances set by the Chinese calendar
 * List of observances set by the Hebrew calendar
 * List of observances set by the Islamic calendar
 * List of observances set by the Solar Hijri calendar

Movable

 * Phi Ta Khon (Dan Sai, Loei province, Isan, Thailand) – Dates are selected by village mediums and can take place anywhere between March and July.
 * Matariki (Māori New Year) – Different iwi celebrate according to their own tradition and the New Zealand Government calculates the public holiday each year according to advice from the Matariki Advisory Committee. Dates can fall from late June to late July.
 * Ra o te Ui Ariki (Cook Islands) July 6
 * Collector Car Appreciation Day (United States)
 * Senior Citizen's Day (Kiribati)
 * Shark Week (United States)
 * Earth Overshoot Day
 * See also Movable Western Christian observances
 * See also Movable Eastern Christian observances

First Friday

 * Fishermen's Holiday (Marshall Islands)

First Saturday

 * Día del Amigo (Peru)
 * International Co-operative Day
 * International Free Hugs Day

First Saturday and Sunday

 * Navy Days (Netherlands)

First Sunday

 * Navy Day (Ukraine)
 * Youth Day (Singapore)

Sunday closest to 2 July

 * Alexanderson Day (Sweden)

First full week in July

 * NAIDOC Week (Australia)

First Monday

 * CARICOM Day (Guyana)
 * Heroes' Day (Zambia)
 * Mother's Day (South Sudan)
 * National Day (Cayman Islands)

5 July or following Monday if it's a weekend

 * Tynwald Day (Isle of Man)

Day after first Monday

 * Unity Day (Zambia)

Second Monday

 * Abolition Commemoration Day (New York, United States)

Second Thursday

 * National Tree Day (Mexico)

Second Sunday

 * Father's Day (Uruguay)
 * Sea Sunday (Western Christianity)

Nearest Sunday to 11 July

 * National Day of Commemoration (Ireland)

Third Monday

 * Birthday of Don Luis Muñoz Rivera (Puerto Rico, United States)
 * Children's Day (Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela)
 * Galla Bayramy (Turkmenistan)
 * Marine Day (Japan)
 * Presidents' Day (Botswana)

Third Sunday

 * Galla Bayramy (Turkmenistan)
 * National Ice Cream Day (United States)

Second to last Sunday in July and the following two weeks

 * Construction Holiday (Quebec)

Third Tuesday

 * Birthday of Don Luis Muñoz Rivera (Puerto Rico, United States)

Fourth Sunday

 * Parents' Day (United States)

Friday preceding the Fourth Saturday and the following Sunday

 * Tobata Gion Yamagasa festival (Tobata, Japan)

Fourth Thursday

 * National Chili Dog Day (United States)

Last Saturday

 * Black Saturday (France)
 * National Dance Day (United States)

Last Sunday

 * Father's Day (Dominican Republic)
 * National Tree Day (Australia)
 * Navy Day (Russia)
 * Reek Sunday (Ireland)

Thursday before the first Monday

 * Emancipation Day (Bermuda)

Following Friday

 * Somer's Day (Bermuda)

Last Friday

 * National Schools Tree Day (Australia)
 * System Administrator Appreciation Day

Fixed Gregorian

 * July 1
 * Armed Forces Day (Singapore)
 * Canada Day (Canada)
 * Children's Day (Pakistan)
 * Chinese Communist Party Founding Day (People's Republic of China)
 * Day of Officials and Civil Servants (Hungary)
 * Doctors' Day (India)
 * Emancipation Day (Netherlands Antilles)
 * Engineer's Day (Bahrain, Mexico)
 * Feast of the Most Precious Blood (removed from official Roman Catholic calendar since 1969)
 * Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day (Hong Kong, China)
 * Independence Day (Burundi)
 * Independence Day (Rwanda)
 * Independence Day (Somalia)
 * International Tartan Day
 * July Morning (Bulgaria)
 * Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) (Suriname)
 * Madeira Day (Madeira, Portugal)
 * Moving Day (Quebec) (Canada)
 * National Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day (United States)
 * National Gingersnap Day (United States)
 * Newfoundland and Labrador Memorial Day
 * Republic Day (Ghana)
 * Sir Seretse Khama Day (Botswana)
 * Territory Day (British Virgin Islands)
 * Van Mahotsav, celebrated until July 7 (India)
 * July 2
 * Flag Day (Curaçao) (Kingdom of the Netherlands)
 * Palio di Provenzano (Siena, Italy)
 * Police Day (Azerbaijan)
 * World UFO Day
 * July 3
 * Saint Thomas the Apostle Day
 * The start of the dog days according to the Old Farmer's Almanac but not according to established meaning in most European cultures.
 * Emancipation Day (United States Virgin Islands)
 * Independence Day (Belarus)
 * July 4
 * Birthday of Queen Sonja (Norway)
 * Dree Festival, celebrated until July 7 (Apatani people, Arunachal Pradesh, India)
 * Independence Day (Abkhazia)
 * Independence Day (United States)
 * Liberation Day (Northern Mariana Islands)
 * Liberation Day (Rwanda)
 * Republic Day (Philippines)
 * July 5
 * Armed Forces Day (Venezuela)
 * Bloody Thursday (International Longshore and Warehouse Union)
 * Constitution Day (Armenia)
 * Fifth of July (New York)
 * Independence Day (Algeria)
 * Independence Day (Cape Verde)
 * Independence Day (Venezuela)
 * Saints Cyril and Methodius Feast Day (celebrated as a public holiday in Slovakia)
 * X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)
 * July 6
 * Constitution Day (Cayman Islands)
 * Day of the Capital (Kazakhstan)
 * National Fried Chicken Day (United States)
 * Independence Day (Comoros)
 * Independence Day/Republic Day, (Malawi)
 * Jan Hus Day (Czech Republic)
 * Kupala Night (Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine)
 * Statehood Day (Lithuania)
 * Teachers' Day (Peru)
 * July 7
 * Independence Day (Solomon Islands)
 * Ivan Kupala Day (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine)
 * Saba Saba Day (Tanzania)
 * Tanabata (Japan, Gregorian date, some follow the traditional calendar)
 * World Chocolate Day
 * July 8
 * Air Force and Air Defense Forces Day (Ukraine)
 * Peter and Fevronia Day (Russian Orthodox)
 * July 9
 * Arbor Day (Cambodia)
 * Constitution Day (Australia)
 * Constitution Day (Palau)
 * Constitutionalist Revolution Day (São Paulo)
 * Day of the Employees of the Diplomatic Service (Azerbaijan)
 * Independence Day (Argentina, South Sudan)
 * Nunavut Day (Nunavut)
 * July 10
 * Armed Forces Day (Mauritania)
 * Beatles Day (Liverpool and Hamburg)
 * Independence Day (Bahamas)
 * Nikola Tesla Day
 * Statehood Day (Wyoming)
 * July 11
 * China National Maritime Day (China)
 * Day of the Flemish Community (Flemish Community of Belgium)
 * Eleventh Night (Northern Ireland)
 * Gospel Day (Kiribati)
 * Imamat Day (Isma'ilism)
 * World Population Day (International)
 * July 12
 * Birthday of the Heir to the Crown of Tonga (Tonga)
 * Independence Day (Kiribati, São Tomé and Príncipe)
 * Malala Day
 * The Twelfth, also known as Orangemen's Day (Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and Labrador)
 * July 13
 * Statehood Day (Montenegro)
 * July 14
 * Bastille Day (France and French dependencies)
 * Birthday of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, an official flag flying day (Sweden)
 * Hondurans' Day (Honduras)
 * Republic Day (Iraq)
 * July 15
 * Bon Festival (Kantō region, Japan)
 * Elderly Men Day (Kiribati)
 * Festival of Santa Rosalia (Palermo, Sicily)
 * Sultan's Birthday (Brunei Darussalam)
 * July 16
 * Last apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes
 * Engineer's Day (Honduras)
 * Holocaust Memorial Day (France)
 * July 17
 * International Firgun Day
 * Constitution Day (Finland)
 * July 18
 * Constitution Day (Uruguay)
 * Nelson Mandela International Day
 * July 19
 * Liberation Day (Nicaragua)
 * Martyrs' Day (Burma)
 * July 20
 * Día del Amigo (Argentina)
 * Engineer's Day (Costa Rica)
 * Independence Day (Colombia)
 * Lempira's Day (Honduras)
 * Tree Planting Day (Central African Republic)
 * July 21
 * Belgian National Day
 * Racial Harmony Day (Singapore)
 * July 22
 * Foundation Day in Cleveland
 * July 23
 * Birthday of Haile Selassie (Rastafari)
 * Children's Day (Indonesia)
 * Flag Day (Abkhazia)
 * National Hot Dog Day (United States)
 * National Remembrance Day (Papua New Guinea)
 * Renaissance Day (Oman)
 * Revolution Day (Egypt)
 * July 24
 * Children's Day (Vanuatu)
 * Navy Day (Venezuela)
 * Pioneer Day (Utah) (United States)
 * Simón Bolívar Day (Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia)
 * July 25
 * Saint James the Great Day
 * Guanacaste Day (Costa Rica)
 * National Day of Galicia (Galicia (Spain))
 * National Baha'i Day (Jamaica)
 * Puerto Rico Constitution Day (Puerto Rico)
 * Republic Day (Tunisia)
 * Revolution Day (Egypt)
 * July 26
 * Day of National Significance (Barbados)
 * Day of the National Rebellion (Cuba)
 * Independence Day (Liberia)
 * Independence Day (Maldives)
 * Kargil Victory Day (India)
 * July 27
 * Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (North Korea)
 * Iglesia ni Cristo Day (the Philippines)
 * José Celso Barbosa Day (Puerto Rico)
 * Martyrs and Wounded Soldiers Day (Vietnam)
 * National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day (United States)
 * National Sleepy Head Day (Finland)
 * July 28
 * Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval (Canada)
 * Fiestas Patrias (Peru)
 * Liberation Day (San Marino)
 * Ólavsøka Eve (Faroe Islands)
 * World Hepatitis Day
 * July 29
 * International Tiger Day
 * National Anthem Day (Romania)
 * National Thai Language Day (Thailand)
 * Ólavsøka, opening of the Løgting session (Faroe Islands)
 * Olsok (Faroe Islands, (Finland, Norway)
 * July 30
 * Feast of the Throne (Morocco)
 * Día del Amigo (Paraguay)
 * Independence Day (Vanuatu)
 * Martyrs Day (South Sudan)
 * July 31
 * Saint Ignatius of Loyola
 * Ka Hae Hawaiʻi Day (Hawaii, United States)
 * Martyrdom Day of Shahid Udham Singh (Haryana and Punjab, India)
 * Treasury Day (Poland)
 * Warriors' Day (Malaysia)

title: July