English writer Jane Austen was BOTD in 1775. Born in Steventon, Hampshire to an impoverished middle-class family, she and her sister Cassandra were sent to school in Oxford and Reading until funds ran out. Returning home in 1786, she lived with her family for the rest of her life, supplementing her education with extensive reading. A compulsive writer from an early age, she wrote her first novel Love and Friendship at 14, showing an early gift for social satire. She wrote and published four novels in her lifetime – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma – bringing her critical acclaim and commercial security. Her narratives focused on intelligent young women negotiating the marriage market, economic insecurity and idiotic relatives, notable for their ironic wit, psychological insight and biting social commentary. Austen never married or had children, famously accepting a marriage proposal and refusing her suitor the next morning. She died in 1817, aged 41. Her completed novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and other writings were published posthumously. Now regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Western literature, her work has never been out of print. Her novels have inspired innumerable film and television adaptations, notably the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and Ang Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility, written by and co-starring Emma Thompson. Austen scholarship received a stimulating shock in 1989 with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s article Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, positing that the “erotic axis” of Sense and Sensibility was the incestuous love between Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, and comparing Marianne’s “excess of sexuality, dangerous to others but chiefly to herself” to 18th century medical texts about compulsive masturbation. Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema also teased out a lesbian subtext between Fanny Price and Mary Crawford in her 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park, enraging Austen scholars (and thrilling literary lesbians) around the world.