Until a couple of years ago, I always assumed that Jane Austen had been a lonely spinster who used her writing as consolation for the life she didn't have. A little like Emily Dickinson, I assumed. But then I read the short and very readable biography by Carol Shields (in the Penguin Lives series) and discovered that the truth was very different.
According to reports from at least one contemporary, Jane Austen was a young woman who liked parties and having a good time and was quite a bit of a flirt. All within the conventional bounds of propriety, of course. She had every expectation of getting married, but for whatever reason this never happened. (Too smart and too poor would be my guess.)
The one thing that everyone interested in Austen knows is that she did her writing in the family parlor, covering up her notebook with sewing when guests arrived. Certainly she indeed did this at least sometimes, but a lot of her writing was done at a desk in a more private part of the house. In any case, her writing was not a secret occupation. On the contrary, she read her novels aloud to her family, and this seems to have been her main purpose in intitially writing them. Her writing was an outgrowth of her family's tradition of entertaining themselves by putting on plays, usually written by the family members themselves.
From the little information available, it does not seem that Jane thought of herself as a writer, in the sense of someone whose books are published and sold in bookstores. Writing for her seems to have been a pastime which she would apparently have readily set aside if she had married.
However she did take her writing seriously, at least later in life, as indicated by the fact that she revised Pride and Prejudice several times in the decade or more between first writing it and the time when it was delivered to a publisher.
Her father was responsible for eventually getting her published. He eventually took one of her later novels, Northhanger Abbey, I believe, to a publisher. I don't think it is known whether this was her father's idea or whether he was acting on Jane's request. (Certainly a young woman like Jane Austen could not have approached a publisher on her own.) Publishing was a very different kind of business in those days. The publisher in question never actually got around to publishing the novel (even after Austen managed to publish another of her novels and was fairly successful with it). When approached by Jane's father, the first publisher's response was that he had fulfilled his contractual obligation by paying the agreed upon sum, and when if ever to publish was solely his own choice. He did offer to sell the novel back to the Austens again for the original amount, but for a few years the Austens declined to take him up on his offer, presumably because they didn't have the money and were unsure of being able to find another publisher. Eventually they did buy it back and got it published elsewhere.
--Lee Lady http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/