Ten fun facts about Jane Austen

Fact 1
Austen was the seventh child of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. She was born in Steventon, a village in southern England in 1775.

Fact 2
In her lifetime she completed six novels, including Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Four of them were published before her death.

Fact 3
Cassandra Leigh Austen was from a higher social rank than her husband and gave Jane Austen the sense of social class that underlies many of her novels. She did not seem to regret the fall in social standing, however, and was a cheerful wife and mother to the family.

Fact 4
There are 14 kisses in Jane Austen’s novels.

Fact 5
The earliest recorded use of the word 'baseball' in an English novel is in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey written in 1798-1799.

Fact 6
Jane Austen was the first writer to use the phrase “dinner party”.

Fact 7
According to her niece, Jane Austen always wore a cap.

Fact 8
Austen honed her comic abilities by writing for her family, in particular her older, Oxford-educated brothers, whom she admired intensely. Though the entire family was literary, only Austen would become a published novelist.

Fact 9
The disease that Jane Austen died of at the age of 41 was never diagnosed in her lifetime. It is thought to have been Addison’s Disease, a tubercular disease of the kidneys.

Fact 10
It has been estimated that at any one time around the world there are more than 600 Jane Austen adaptations being produced. China has increased its Jane Austen output by 400 per cent over the past five years, and looks set to be the world leader by 2012.