Jane Austen

An English novelist whose six completed novels, published anonymously during her lifetime as 'By a Lady,' established the novel of manners as a serious literary form through their ironic, closely observed treatment of courtship, marriage and social class among the English gentry. Her reputation, modest in her own lifetime, grew steadily after her death and now places her among the most widely read novelists in English; her narrative technique of free indirect discourse, rendering a character's inner thought within the third-person narration itself, influenced the development of the novel well beyond her own period.