Who Was Jane Austen?

1. A clergyman's daughter in Hampshire

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, a village in Hampshire in southern England, where her father, George Austen, was the rector. She was the seventh of eight children, and the second of two daughters. The family was respectable but not wealthy: George Austen's income as a clergyman was modest, and the family depended on it, on a small farm, and on taking in pupils. The Austen children grew up in a lively, bookish household, where reading aloud, amateur theatricals and writing for fun were part of everyday life. Jane and her elder sister Cassandra, to whom she was closest, were sent to school in Oxford and Southampton and then in Reading, but most of Jane's education came from her father's library, which held several hundred books, and from the family's habit of reading and discussing what they read.

From her early teens, Austen wrote stories, plays and parodies for the amusement of her family. These juvenilia, as they are now called, include a history of England written in the voice of a prejudiced schoolgirl, a collection of short comic pieces, and a novella in letters called Lady Susan. They show a young writer already in possession of her greatest gifts: a sharp eye for pretension, a gift for dialogue, and a delight in mocking the conventions of the sentimental novels of the day. She wrote for her family, not for publication, and the pieces were copied into notebooks that were passed around the house. It was a private apprenticeship, and it lasted for years, but it taught her the craft on which her mature novels depend.

In 1801, when Jane was twenty-five, her father retired and the family moved to Bath, a fashionable spa town. The move was unhappy for Jane: she disliked Bath, she wrote little there, and her father's death in 1805 left the family in difficult financial circumstances. For several years the Austens lived with relatives and friends, moving between Bath, Southampton and the homes of Jane's brothers, and Jane wrote almost nothing. It was a long fallow period, and it is one of the puzzles of her life: the writer who had produced three drafts of novels in her teens and early twenties stopped writing for nearly a decade. The explanation probably lies in the disruption of her life and in the lack of a settled home, and the resumption of her writing coincided with the family finally finding a permanent home again.

2. Chawton: the writing years

In 1809 Jane's brother Edward, who had been adopted by wealthy relatives and had inherited large estates in Hampshire and Kent, offered his mother and sisters a cottage on his estate at Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire. The cottage, which is now the Jane Austen's House museum, gave Jane the settled home she had lacked for eight years, and she began to write again almost immediately. She revised the drafts she had written in her youth and prepared them for publication, and she wrote new novels at a remarkable pace. In the seven years between her arrival at Chawton and her death in 1817, she published four novels and wrote two more, a rate of production that has never been matched in so short a working life.

Her working habits were modest and secretive. She wrote on a small table in the family sitting room, and she kept her work hidden from visitors, slipping her papers under a blotter when someone came in. She wrote in the mornings, and she revised as she went, working in pencil before copying out a fair version in ink. She did not have a study of her own, and she did not have the leisure that a wealthier writer might have enjoyed: she shared a house with her mother and sister, she took her turn with household tasks, and she lived in a world where a woman writing novels was still regarded as slightly improper. The fact that she produced six masterpieces in these circumstances is part of what makes her achievement so remarkable.

Her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, appeared in October 1811, when she was thirty-five. It was published anonymously, as all her novels were in her lifetime, with the words By a Lady on the title page. It sold well enough to earn her a modest profit, and it was followed by Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, Mansfield Park in May 1814, and Emma in December 1815. She was writing Persuasion and revising Northanger Abbey, an early work, when her health began to fail. She died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, and the two remaining novels were published together at the end of that year, with a biographical notice by her brother Henry that finally named her as the author.

3. The six novels

Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who are left poor by their father's death and must find husbands. Elinor represents sense, restraint and good judgement; Marianne represents sensibility, feeling and openness. The novel follows their contrasting fortunes in love, and it ends with both sisters married, but not before Marianne has nearly died of a broken heart and Elinor has concealed her own suffering. It is the most schematic of Austen's novels, but it already shows her gift for dialogue and her interest in the economics of marriage: the Dashwood sisters' poverty is not a background detail but the engine of the plot.

Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, is Austen's most famous novel and one of the most famous novels in English. It opens with a sentence that has become part of the language: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. The novel tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a country gentleman, and her slow movement from dislike to love for the proud Mr Darcy. Elizabeth is Austen's most vivid heroine, witty, intelligent and quick to judge, and her errors of judgement, and Darcy's, are the substance of the novel. It is a comedy of manners, but it is also a serious study of how first impressions mislead and how self-knowledge is earned.

Mansfield Park, published in 1814, is the darkest and most serious of the novels. Its heroine, Fanny Price, is a poor relation taken into the wealthy household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, where she is treated as an inferior. The novel follows her quiet resistance to the values of the house, and her eventual marriage to Edmund Bertram, the only member of the family who treats her as an equal. Emma, published in 1815, is a comedy about a young woman who believes she understands other people's hearts and is repeatedly proved wrong. Its heroine, Emma Woodhouse, is rich, clever and spoiled, and the novel is a study of self-deception told with such intimacy that the reader shares Emma's mistakes before seeing through them. Northanger Abbey, written earlier and published after her death, is a parody of the Gothic novel, and Persuasion, her last completed work, is a quiet, autumnal story of a woman who refused a proposal in youth and is given a second chance.

4. Money, marriage and the world of the gentry

Austen's novels are often described as romances, but they are more accurately studies of economics. In the world she wrote about, a woman of the landed gentry had almost no way of earning a living, and her whole future depended on marriage. A woman with no fortune had to marry a man with one, and a woman with a fortune had to be careful not to lose it to a fortune hunter. Austen's plots turn on incomes, inheritances and settlements: the Dashwood sisters are poor because their father's estate is entailed to a male heir; Elizabeth Bennet's family faces the same problem; Emma Woodhouse is rich and can afford to be careless; Fanny Price is poor and cannot. The sums of money are always precise, and they are always meaningful. When a character is said to have an income of a certain amount a year, the reader is meant to understand exactly what kind of life that buys.

This is why the novels, for all their comedy, are serious. Marriage in Austen is not just a romantic ending but an economic decision with lifelong consequences, and her heroines must learn to judge character, not just income. The villains of the novels are men who marry for money, who gamble, who seduce and abandon, or who use their wealth to bully others. The heroes are men who are honest, generous and capable of admitting they were wrong. Austen's moral vision is clear: a good marriage is one in which two people respect each other and see each other clearly, and a bad one is one in which money, vanity or social pressure decides. It is a vision that has survived the world she wrote about, which is why the novels still speak to readers who live in very different circumstances.

Austen's world is narrow, and she knew it. She wrote about the country gentry of southern England, about people who lived on incomes from land, who went to balls and visited their neighbours, and who rarely thought about the wider world. The Napoleonic Wars, which were raging for most of her adult life, appear only at the edges of her novels, in the form of officers on leave and sailors returning home. The slave trade, on which some of the wealth of her world depended, is mentioned briefly in Mansfield Park, in a scene where Fanny Price asks her uncle about it and is met with silence. Some readers have criticised her for ignoring the great events of her time, and others have praised her for understanding that her subject was the small world she knew, and for rendering it with a precision that no one else has matched. She herself said that her work was like a small piece of ivory, two inches wide, on which she worked with a fine brush.

5. Irony and free indirect discourse

Austen's greatest technical achievement is her use of irony, the art of saying one thing and meaning another, and of letting the reader see what the characters cannot. Her narrators are rarely straightforward: they report what characters think and say, and at the same time they quietly invite the reader to judge it. The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice is ironic, because the truth it states is not universal at all but the opinion of the neighbourhood, and the novel goes on to show how wrong the neighbourhood can be. Her dialogue is equally layered: characters reveal themselves by what they say, and often by what they do not say, and the reader learns to listen for the gap between words and meaning.

Her second great technique is free indirect discourse, a way of presenting a character's thoughts in the narrator's voice, without quotation marks or the words she thought. When Emma Woodhouse is deceiving herself about her feelings, the narrative slips into her thoughts so smoothly that the reader shares her error, and only later realises it. When Elizabeth Bennet is re-reading Darcy's letter, the narrative moves between her thoughts and the narrator's commentary so fluidly that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. This technique, which Austen developed further than any writer before her, allows the reader to live inside a character's mind while still seeing the character from the outside, and it is one of the reasons her novels feel so modern. The novelist Virginia Woolf, writing a century later, said that Austen was the most perfect artist among women, and that her work was the only fiction of its kind.

Austen's style is precise, economical and musical. She uses few adjectives, she avoids elaborate description, and she trusts the reader to understand what is meant. Her sentences are balanced and carefully constructed, and her comedy depends on timing: a remark that seems innocent on first reading becomes devastating on a second. She is often compared to Shakespeare for her understanding of character, and to the great moralists for her judgement, but her tone is her own: amused, detached and unsentimental, and always on the side of intelligence. She does not preach, and she does not sentimentalise. She shows, and she leaves the judgement to the reader.

6. Love, loss and a life without marriage

Austen never married, and her own romantic life is a subject of much speculation. She received at least one proposal, from Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy neighbour, in December 1802. She accepted it in the evening and withdrew her acceptance the next morning, a decision that her family understood and that she never explained. She is also said to have fallen in love with a young clergyman she met at the seaside, who died soon afterwards, but the evidence for this story is thin: it comes from a memoir written by her nephew many years later, and it cannot be verified. What is known is that she lived with her family all her life, that she was close to her sister Cassandra, who also never married, and that her novels are full of women who must choose between love and security, a choice she herself faced and resolved by choosing independence.

The absence of marriage in her own life has led to much discussion about what her novels mean. Some readers see her as a romantic who believed in love, and some see her as a realist who understood that love without money was a luxury few women could afford. Both readings are true, and that is the point: her heroines marry for love, but they marry men who can support them, and the novels are careful to show that love alone is not enough. Elizabeth Bennet marries Darcy, who is rich; Elinor Dashwood marries Edward Ferrars, who has an income; Emma Woodhouse marries Mr Knightley, who is her equal in fortune. The only heroine who marries without money is Fanny Price, and her marriage is the least romantic of the six. Austen's view of marriage is practical as well as romantic, and it reflects the world she lived in, where a woman's choices were few and the consequences of a wrong choice were severe.

Her family life was the centre of her world. She was close to her brothers, who supported her writing and helped her publish, and to her nieces and nephews, for whom she wrote stories and letters. Her letters, of which more than a hundred and sixty survive, most of them to Cassandra, are lively, funny and observant, and they show a woman who was engaged with the world around her, who enjoyed gossip and balls and plays, and who was sharply aware of the absurdities of the people she met. After her death, Cassandra destroyed many of the letters, and the family was careful about what it revealed, so much of Austen's private life remains unknown. What survives is enough to show a woman of intelligence, humour and independence, who chose a life of writing over the security of marriage, and who paid for that choice with a lifetime of modest means.

7. Death, reputation and the afterlife of the novels

Austen's health began to fail in 1816. She suffered from fatigue, back pain and fevers, and she became too weak to write for long stretches. She moved to Winchester in May 1817 to be near her doctor, and she died there on 18 July 1817, aged forty-one. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where a memorial plaque was later placed. The cause of her death is not known for certain. Later writers have suggested Addison's disease, a disorder of the adrenal glands, and Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, but neither diagnosis has been proven, and the evidence is too thin for a firm conclusion. What is known is that she died young, that she was working until close to the end, and that she left two novels unpublished and one, Sanditon, unfinished.

Her reputation grew slowly after her death. Her brother Henry's biographical notice, published with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1817, presented her as a modest, dutiful daughter who wrote as a pastime, a portrait that her family maintained for many years. The novels were admired by a small circle of readers, including the novelist Walter Scott, who praised her in print, but they were not widely read. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century, when her nephew published a memoir in 1869, that she became a popular author, and by the twentieth century she was established as one of the great English novelists. The twentieth century also brought the first serious criticism of her work, and the recognition that her novels were not just charming comedies but complex works of art.

Today Austen is read, studied and adapted more than almost any other novelist. Her novels have been filmed, televised, staged and rewritten countless times, and her characters have entered the language: Mr Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Mr Collins are known to people who have never read the books. She is studied in universities around the world, and her house at Chawton is visited by readers from every country. The secret of her endurance is that her subject, the way people judge each other and the way they learn to see clearly, does not age. Her world of balls and country houses is gone, but the questions she asked about pride, prejudice, money and love are still the questions that matter, and her answers are still among the wisest ever written.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jane Austen
• Wikipedia — Jane Austen
• Jane Austen Society of North America — About Jane Austen

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• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.