Wikipedia:Today's featured list/December 17, 2012
For her entire life, Jane Austen (illustration pictured) lived as part of a family located socially and economically on the lower fringes of the English gentry. She was primarily educated at home by her father and older brothers and through her own reading. Her apprenticeship as a writer lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she wrote three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1815, with the release of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published after her death in 1817, and began a third, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before it could be completed. Austen published all of her novels in the Regency period, during which King George III was declared permanently insane and his son was appointed as prince regent. Throughout most of Austen's adult life, Britain was at war with revolutionary France. (Full list...)