Jane Austen

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 spent periods in Bath, Southampton and other parts of southern England before settling at Chawton, where she completed or revised most of her mature work. Historical mysteries that present a young Jane as a detective draw on her juvenilia, intelligence and social observation, but the crimes and investigations are fictional rather than documented episodes from her life.

In Julia Golding’s The Austen Intrigue, Jane Austen joins the investigation, bringing an outsider's attention to behaviour, language and social performance. In Julia Golding’s The Convict's Canal, during a family visit near Oxford, Jane Austen becomes fascinated by the new canal terminus and the convicts employed on its construction.