Jane Austen

English novelist who wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion — the supreme comic novelist in the English language — whose ironic comedy of manners masks a rigorous moral psychology of self-deception, vanity, and the education of the heart.

Created the novel of ironic consciousness — the reader sees more than the character sees about themselves — and demonstrated that the domestic world of courtship and marriage is as fit a subject for philosophical comedy as Greek tragedy is for philosophical tragedy.