It was during these years that she wrote Northanger Abbey. Austen visited Bath several times in the late 1790s, then moved there with her parents in 1801. She accepted his proposal, then called the marriage off the next morning. Austen never married, but she was proposed to once by a well-off, but personally unattractive man. Austen began to write as a teen, reading her works of fiction aloud to her family. The family’s richer relatives wrote and visited often, conveying the news and fashions from Paris and London to the rural vicarage. Austen’s family home was a jovial place, with plays often performed in the barn, and aunts and cousins frequently coming to visit. To supplement his income as a clergyman, Austen’s father farmed the land around his home and educated young boys who boarded in the rectory. She was the seventh of eight children and had only one sister, Cassandra, who was three years older than Jane. Jane Austen was born into a money-strapped but intellectual family in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, England.
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