This work is a study of the life and work of Jane Austen, who sprang from the upper-middle class society of late 18th-century southern England. Self-contained, orthodox in morals and religion, depending for its strength on the professions and on the ownership of the land - this was the milieu in which she spent her life and which she describes so memorably in her novels. Her environment provided her with material ideally suited to her talents: accurate observation of character, wit, dramatic intuition, an ear for realistic dialogue and a highly disciplined formal sense.