Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist. She wrote six novels about money, marriage and the narrow room women were given to negotiate both, and they were published anonymously in her lifetime. Her name appeared on them only after she died.

Born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, she had the Sun and Mercury together in Sagittarius, which is the sign of the long view and the unsparing joke, and a Moon in Libra sitting in the same sign as Saturn. Libra is fairness, pairing, what people owe one another. Saturn is the limit. A Moon and a Saturn together in Libra is somebody who sees exactly how the arrangement is meant to work and exactly where it does not, and who is not permitted to say so out loud. She wrote six books about precisely that.

The tightest hard aspect in her chart is Mars square Saturn, exact to under half a degree: drive meeting refusal, effort running into obstruction again and again until it turns into either resentment or real competence. She had no profession open to her, no legal standing of her own, and a readership that would not have taken the books seriously with a woman's name on them. The chart does not say she rose above any of that. It says the obstruction was constant, and that what it made of her was craft.

Her Sun squares Neptune, almost exact, and that one is the self obscured: not being seen clearly, never quite having an outline. For a novelist whose books went out with no author's name on them at all, it is a hard thing to read without flinching.

She died at Winchester on 18 July 1817, aged forty one. The Moon was a thin crescent, eighteen per cent lit, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done, and the transiting Sun stood opposite the Pluto of her birth to within a sixteenth of a degree. She never saw her own name on a cover. Two centuries later it is on more of them than almost anybody's.