Austen wasn’t deterred though and in 1803 a publisher bought her novel Susan for £10 (the equivalent of £350). However, they failed to do anything with it. So it was only when Sense And Sensibility appeared in 1811 (almost 20 years after she had started writing it) that she was finally a published author. However, she didn’t see her own success, dying in 1817, aged 41, of tuberculosis or cancer, after which her works were largely forgotten. She earned only £600 (now less than £20,000) from her books in total.

In her latter years Austen witnessed the printing of the first edition of Emma in 1815 but it was pulped after four years with only 563 of 2000 sold. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, even Pride And Prejudice, were remaindered in the 1820s and Austen went out of print for a decade. Her fortunes only turned at the end of the century when the first biography of her was written by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. Victorian society became fascinated first by her exemplary, quiet life, then by her novels.

This marked the transition from obscurity to being one of this century and last’s most influential literary figures. It’s hard to believe her six short novels – yes, it really is just six – are still bought in their millions (because her work is out of copyright, there is no accurate estimate of how many). Austen’s influence and literary pulling-power can’t be over-estimated. She’s reached millions of people all over the world, not simply through the number of languages she’s been translated into (35 at the last count), but because there’s something in her work that readers connect with instantly. We read her because we feel she understands us – despite being born over two centuries ago.

In many ways, her books are more in tune with our times and tastes than her own. In the first review she ever received, she was taken to task for a ‘want of newness’, but her books now seem markedly more original than anything else of the period. After all, have you read any Sir Walter Scott – a contemporary of Austen’s – who sold proportionally the same amount then as JK Rowling has today? Austen simply wasn’t loved by the reviewers of her time. In 1817, English author Maria Edgeworth found the plot of Emma dull, while another contemporary novelist, Mary Russell Mitford, thought the wit of Elizabeth Bennet showed an “entire want of taste”. So perhaps Austen was so ahead of her time, she couldn’t be completely understood by her contemporaries. Over the past decades we have loved the fact that Lizzie is always answering back (and is fine with making self-deprecating remarks, such as admitting that she began to love Mr Darcy when she first saw his enormous estate, Pemberley). Austen knew her characters went against the grain and that she was out of step with her times. “I am going to take a heroine whom nobody but myself will much like,” she said when setting out to write Emma.

Out of Time

It is a shame Austen never got to see her legacy. We buy into her work to such an extent that there is an endless stream of film and TV adaptations, sequels, prequels, mash-ups and homages. Just when you think Colin Firth in his wet shirt can’t be topped, or the Bollywood glitz of Bride And Prejudice bettered, along comes PD James with a new mystery, Death Comes To Pemberley and Joanna Trollope announces she’s going to rewrite Sense And Sensibility as a contemporary romance. We are constantly exposed to Austen’s manners, her morals, and her portrayal of women – and it has shaped the way we view all sorts of things.

Of course, Austen’s books have surface appeal too. She is unparalleled at luring us into a fantasy world of bonnets and gossip – ‘literary comfort food’ as the author Lori Smith has called it. It’s a world where there are single men of good fortune like Mr Darcy round every corner, in possession of a stately home and in want of a wife. There’s something for everyone: a great plot, a happy ending (always), carriages, ballgowns and romance. Think about the best love scenes you’ve ever read – how many of them at least faintly echo the understated passion, or endless yearning, of Austen? She has a hold over how we see love, and our voracious appetite for it – nearly half of all paperbacks published now are romances, and Austen is the acknowledged mother of the genre. She took the age-old romance plot and gave it several twists, centralising the heroine’s point of view, tastes and desires. Guardian columnist Zoe Williams believes Austen’s greatest mainstream influence is “the heart wants what it wants idea where a person’s true love is more important than his or her social duties. In Jane Austen’s own century that actually would have been considered pretty abhorrent.”