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Historical person

Jane Austen

1775–1817

Jane Austen was born at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire in 1775 and grew up in a large clerical family. She began writing stories and dramatic sketches when young, later revising early manuscripts into novels including Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. Her published fiction combined controlled irony with close observation of rank, money, marriage and moral choice.

Austen published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma during her lifetime, while Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously. Her precise social observation, free indirect style and treatment of marriage, money and status made her one of the most influential English novelists.

Julia Golding’s Jane Austen Investigates imagines the young Austen solving the theft of a diamond necklace and learning to distrust the easy prejudices of respectable society. Nancy Moser’s Just Jane follows Austen’s family life, courtship choices and long struggle to turn private writing into published novels. Golding’s The Austen Intrigue brings her into a London murder and espionage investigation, while The Convict's Canal makes her curiosity about an Oxford canal project the route into a disappearance and financial crime. C. S. Harris’ Who Buries the Dead uses Austen more sparingly, placing her and members of her circle inside Sebastian St Cyr’s investigation of a murder whose connections reach into politics, slavery and the relics of the Stuart past.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Jane Austen (4 series)

Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery in Order

by C. S. Harris 21 books 4.3(208,269)

The Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries follow Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a former cavalry officer and intelligence agent who investigates murders in Regency Britain. Beginning in 1811, his cases carry him from royal palaces and Mayfair drawing rooms to prisons, docks, rookeries and country villages, where violent crimes…

All books in this series

Regency Secrets in Order

by Julia Golding 4 books 4.1(3,749)

The Regency Secrets series pairs Dora Fitz-Pennington, an independent aristocratic investigator, with physician and former army surgeon Dr Jacob Sandys. Beginning in 1812, their cases expose murder and conspiracy beneath the cultivated surface of Regency society, from secret clubs and classical antiquities to literary manuscripts and wartime espionage.…

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Jane Austen Investigates in Order

by Julia Golding 2 books 4.3(84)

Jane Austen Investigates imagines the young Jane Austen applying observation, scepticism and an ear for revealing conversation to mysteries encountered before her published career. The cases turn the social settings later associated with her novels—schools, balls, family visits and ambitious professionals—into scenes of theft, disappearance and injustice. The…

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Women of History in Order

by Nancy Moser 4 books 4.5(1,551)

Women of History presents fictionalised first-person or close biographical portraits of four real women whose achievements were constrained by family, gender and public expectation: Maria Anna Mozart, Jane Austen, Martha Washington and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The novels draw on documented events while imaginatively reconstructing private conversations, emotions and…

All books in this series