Jane Austen's Daily Routine

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion, novels still read 200 years later. Her writing routine had no study. From 1809 until her death in 1817 she lived at Chawton in Hampshire and wrote in the family sitting room.

Mason Currey's Daily Rituals, summarised by Meaningring, has her up early to play the piano before the other women were up. At 9:00 AM she made the family breakfast, her one major piece of housework, then settled down to write with her mother and sister sewing nearby. Dinner came between 3:00 PM and 4:00 PM, and the evening went to conversation, cards, tea and reading novels aloud, her own included. HuffPost adds that she wrote on small sheets of paper she could hide when visitors came.

It's for anyone who has to make things in a shared, busy home, with no spare room and people who need you nearby. It also suits anyone whose work gets interrupted.

You get a long stretch of work that doesn't depend on a perfect space, one fixed chore to start the day and evenings for the people you live with. Try it with a notebook you can set down and pick up, and one block right after the morning chore. Only breakfast and dinner are timed in the sources; her wake time, the end of the writing and the evening are our estimates.