Jane West

Personal

Vocation

Family

English novelist, poet, playwright, and writer of conduct literature and educational tracts, who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West. Today she is best known as the author of a novel that served as a source text for Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811). West's A Gossip’s Story (1796), like Austen’s novel, features two sisters, one full of rational sense and the other of romantic, emotive sensibility. West’s romantic sister shares the same name as Austen’s: Marianne. By 1783 Jane West was married to Thomas West (d. 1823), a yeoman farmer of Little Bowden, Leicestershire. They had three sons. In 1800 she wrote to the man of letters Thomas Percy, bishop of Dromore, seeking his patronage and describing herself as self-instructed and interested in poetry from an early age. Jane West benefited from the acquaintance with Bishop Percy, whom she visited in 1810, although her literary connections were never extensive. She corresponded with Sarah Trimmer and wrote a series of poems in praise of women writers: Trimmer, Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Turner Smith, whom she visited in Ireland and Anna Seward. West's writing is consistently conservative and didactic, but she did advocate expanding the education for women. Her works serve as a counterpoint to the revolutionary politics of the day: A Tale of the Times (1799) is anti-Jacobin, and The Infidel Father (1802) attacks atheism. She died at Little Bowden on 25 March 1852, aged 93. Link to Wikipedia biography