Questions Still Linger on Jane Austen's 1817 Death

Tuesday marks 250 years since Jane Austen's birth, and despite much scrutiny, we're still in the dark about the novelist's cause of death. Austen died in her sister's arms in 1817 at 41 after nearly a year of waxing-and-waning illness that she described in letters as bringing fatigue, fever, joint pain, and a striking facial rash, per CNN. With no surviving medical records or definitive death certificate, modern doctors and literary scholars have been forced to work from those brief accounts, plus family recollections, to piece together a diagnosis. Theories have included Addison's disease, cancer, tuberculosis, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and accidental poisoning, per National Geographic, but each comes up short on key symptoms, according to physicians who have reexamined the case.

The latest high-profile attempt, published in 2021 in the journal Lupus, came from two British eye specialists and Austen devotees, the late Dr. Michael Sanders and Dr. Elizabeth Graham, per CNN. After reviewing every surviving letter and building a timeline of her decline, they concluded Austen most likely had systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease known for joint problems, facial skin changes, fevers, fatigue, and unpredictable flare-ups. They dismissed Addison's disease because its skin darkening is permanent and widespread, unlike Austen's transient facial rash, and found little in the historical record to support tuberculosis or lymphoma.

Though there are preserved locks of Austen's hair, the samples are either contaminated or scientifically unlikely to yield clear answers, with most experts concluding the mystery will never be settled. But the effort to diagnose Austen centuries on has highlighted how closely her fiction—full of frailty, illness, recovery, and quiet resilience—tracks the reality of a writer who stayed wry and industrious almost to her last breath. Her final novels, especially Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon, are dense with illness, injury, and the quest for cures at spas and seaside resorts—scenes that scholars say mirror contemporary medical culture and her own failing health.