was Jane Austen poor?
....?
shareAfter her father died, Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother lived together to save money. The Austen brothers helped to support them. At one point, a family friend, Martha Lloyd, moved in with them.
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She wasn't rich, but she had a reasonably comfortable existence--a decent house, clothes, and plenty of food.
shareBut she had no money of her own, other than the little she earned from writing. She spent her entire life being dependent on others.
I suppose it's like this: Miss Austen had all the necessities of life, she had a free place to life and food on the table, and pretty clothes to wear, and she didn't have to go work as someone else's housemaid. Yet her peers would have considered her "poor", as she had no dowry, and she would have considered herself poor if you could have gotten an honest answer from her (and no lady of that era would have given an honest answer to such an impertinent question). Because financially she was at the low end for her social class, and the fact that she had no dowry meant that she was considered to be unmarriagable by her peers, something that would have been very hurtful to her on a personal level.
It was better to be a comfortable old maid than someone else's chambermaid, but I doubt she saw it that way.
The first female author to make a great living --in the US anyway-- was Louisa May Alcott. She had grown up poor and was a Civil War nurse stationed in Wash., DC.
shareI don't think anyone was getting rich from writing novels in Miss Austen's time, even Jane Eyre only netted Charlotte Bronte 500 pounds for a huge best-seller in 1847, when novels were more established and popular. Which is more than Jane Austen earned from all her books put together, but that was like a year's income for people with little.
By the end of the 19th century top authors like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens were getting making pretty good money, if they supplemented their income with lecture tours... rather like today's writers! But Dickens and Twain were working in a fiction-loving world that Jane Austen helped to build, not that she profited from doing so.