Jane West (novelist)

In 1800 she wrote to the man of letters Thomas Percy, bishop of Dromore, seeking his patronage and describing herself as self-instructed and interested in poetry from an early age.

Her works serve as a counterpoint to the revolutionary politics of the day: A Tale of the Times (1799) is anti-Jacobin; The Infidel Father (1802) attacks atheism; and one of her conduct texts, Letters to a Young Lady, "forms an ideological counterpart to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

[5] West is best known today as the author of a novel that served as a source text for Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811).

Her novel A Gossip's Story (1796), like Austen's novel, features two sisters, one full of rational sense and the other of romantic, emotive sensibility.

[6] Austen significantly reworked West's plot and characters to suit her own vision, as Shakespeare had done with the works of forebears before her.