After her death, her family built a carefully sanitized image of a mild, quiet spinster observing polite society from a parlor corner. Her sister Cassandra even burned most of her personal letters. This deep dive looks past that romanticized myth to find a fiercely intelligent, razor-sharp satirist and shrewd businesswoman who exposed the brutal economics of the English gentry.

We trace her chaotic upbringing in the working Steventon Rectory, her near-fatal bout of typhus, the heartbreak of Tom Lefroy, and the marriage proposal from Harris Bigwither that she accepted and then revoked the next morning. Financial anxiety and lost love sharpened her comic voice and grounded her fiction in stark realism.

• Her early juvenilia parodies mocking the swooning, sentimental heroines of popular fiction
• The class barriers and rules of  ...