Happy 200th Birthday to 'Pride and Prejudice'

• Jane Austen (1775-1817) was one of eight children in a close-knit family
• Born on 16 December 1775 in the village of Steventon in Hampshire
• In 1801 the family moved to Bath
• After the death of her father, the family moved several times, eventually settling in Chawton, Hampshire
• Her brother Henry negotiated with a publisher for her first novel, Sense and Sensibility
• She described her next, Pride and Prejudice, as her "own darling child"
• In 1816 Austen began to suffer from ill-health, thought to be Addison's disease. She died in Winchester a year later, aged 41
• Her legacy was six celebrated novels, which offered insight into the lives of middle- and upper-class women in the early 19th Century
  
  

Colin Firth as Mr Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (BBC 1995)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21078941