Jane Austen (Author) Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Hampshire in 1775, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement, as well as a novella, Lady Susan . Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility , which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park and Emma . Austen died in 1817, and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818. Dolly Alderton (Introducer) Dolly Alderton is an award-winning author and screenwriter based in London. She is a columnist for the Sunday Times Style magazine and is the former co-host and co-creator of the podcast The High Low . Her first book, Everything I Know About Love , became a top-five Sunday Times bestseller in its first week of publication, won a National Book Award (UK) for Autobiography of the Year and was made into a BBC One TV series. Both of her novels, Ghosts (published 2020) and Good Material (published 2023), were instant Sunday Times bestsellers.

Dear Dolly, a collection of her agony aunt columns from the Sunday Times Style magazine, was published in 2022, and was also a Sunday Times bestseller.