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Despite the growing profile of female writers by the Regency period, genteel women were still not expected to make a living from their art. Jane Austen was, however, committed to novel-writing as a profession.

Her own domestic circumstances and the confinement of her fictional subjects to the drawing rooms of the rural gentry appeared to place her firmly within accepted codes of feminine behaviour.

Even her portrait - the only known image from life - belongs to the private, amateur tradition. But Austen's satirical eye analysed and mocked these constraints even as she seemed to accept them. Her novels scrutinised the tedium and lack of fulfilment that pervaded the life of gentlewomen and promoted independence and autonomy as essential female virtues. Austen persuaded her father and brother to approach publishers on her behalf and her work enjoyed huge contemporary success among both male and female readers.

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