She wrote too, throughout her childhood – short stories and plays for the family to perform.īut in 1805, her father died, and the family’s only real source of income vanished overnight. There were books at home, though, and Jane read them all.

Jane and her sister, Cassandra, were given a short spell of formal education during the mid-1780s, but that was all her parents could afford. The Austen family were rural gentry, but relatively poor by the standard of their class. Her dad was a vicar, and her maternal grandfather was the rector of All Souls College, Oxford. And for a woman in Georgian England, you could even say that writing was in itself a radical act.Īusten may not have been on the barricades in France, but her novels offered radical critiques of the patriarchal society of Georgian Englandīorn in Hampshire on the 16th of December, 1775, Jane Austen grew up amid books and learning. Well, literature can be a field for radical history, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Olympe de Gouges. Jane Austen didn’t have the same commitment to radical politics as contemporaries like The same could be said of some of our other figures celebrated on our tea towels:Ĭhristina Rossetti, Robert the Bruce, and Edmund Burke to name just a few. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”įirst things first: Jane Austen, born today in 1775, was hardly a fire-breathing radical. “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. Born on this day in 1775, Jane Austen challenged the sexism of her time - and made a living in the process

Jane austen radical