Biographical information on Jane Austen is famously scarce. Most people who read the novels know that she was a clergyman's daughter who grew up in a country parsonage with several brothers and one beloved sister, that she never married and that she died relatively young. They may know that she was born in 1775 (16 December), in tandem with the revolutionary end of the eighteenth century, and did not publish a novel until 1811, six years before her death in a more conservative period.

To give us more than those bare facts, we have few materials. Nothing biographical written before her early death remains, apart from some family letters, including her own that have survived. The greatest number were written to her sister Cassandra, older by three years. Cassandra censored these letters, omitting accounts of illness, unhappiness and apparently Austen's one-night engagement. Although Austen was deeply attached to her family and had as well a number of women friends (generally older), she was closer to Cassandra than to anyone. A great-niece born after Austen’s death but who knew Cassandra wrote that ‘they were wedded to each other by the resemblance of their circumstances, and in truth there was an exclusiveness in their love such as only exists between husband and wife’. Austen's best friend, Cassandra was also her first critic, reading the novels as she wrote them.

After Austen's death, we must rely for information about her life on her brother Henry's short ‘Biographical Notice’ published in 1818, and other family materials and reminiscences primarily supplied by nephews and nieces. These established the family legend, reiterated through the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, that Austen was an ideal unmarried domestic woman, the modest, helpful, unassuming product of a large, happy family that formed the centre of her life.

Many full-length biographies of Austen, forced to base themselves on such skimpy or censored sources and on what can be gleaned from the novels and the juvenilia, follow the lead of Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. His Memoir (1870) offered anecdotal accounts of manners and customs of Austen's period to flesh out and support the family story, and modern biographers too tend to offer social history of Austen's time. But they also include disturbing material that the family legend omits or obscures.