Jules Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on the Île Feydeau in Nantes. He was the eldest son of Pierre Verne, a third-generation lawyer, and Sophie, née Allotte de la Fuÿe, who came from a family of ship owners and merchants. His brother Paul was born the following year and the two boys enjoyed summers spent at the family estate at Chantenay on the Loire where they could go sailing. Paul later became a naval officer. The boys had three younger sisters: Anna, Mathilde and Marie.

Verne attended school at Nantes and passed his baccalauréat in 1846. He went on to study law, sitting his exams in Paris where he also undertook his final year of studies. Having passed his degree in 1849, he remained in Paris, aspiring to become not a lawyer, as his father might have hoped, but a writer. His uncle Châteaubourg had already introduced him to the city’s literary salons and he had begun writing plays and short pieces of prose. His one-act comedy Les Pailles Rompues (Broken Straws) opened at the Théâtre Historique owned by his friend Alexandre Dumas in June 1850. It ran for 12 nights. The following year his first short stories were published in the illustrated family magazine Le Musée de Familles. He also wrote the librettos for operattas, sometimes collaborating with his musician friend Aristide Hignard who was from Nantes.

After leading a rather bohemian life amid the theatres, salons and brothels of Paris, on 10 January 1857 Verne married Honorine Morel (née de Viane) a young widow from Amiens who had two daughters. Unable to support his new family from his writing, he found a position as a stockbroker with his father’s help. He rose every morning at dawn to write until breakfast before reluctantly heading off to the offices of Eggly & Co. Verne’s grandson, Jean Jules-Verne, reports that, once at work, Verne ‘spent more time discussing literature than actually doing business’.

Since childhood Verne had loved the sea and yearned for opportunities to travel. In 1859 he made an extensive trip to Scotland and England with his friend Hignard, which provided Verne with material later used in his novels. Two years later the two men spent 12 weeks travelling in Norway and Denmark, causing Verne to miss the birth of his only son Michel on 3 August 1861. In later years he would travel around the Mediterranean and Baltic, to Portugal, North Africa and North America and back to Scotland and England.

In 1862 Verne met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and showed him his manuscript for an adventure story about a trip by balloon. Hetzel suggested some alterations, which Verne completed within two weeks, and the story was published as Cinq Semaines en Ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) early the following year. It was an immediate success. Thus began a professional partnership that lasted until Hetzel’s death in 1886. Although biographers have pointed out that Hetzel made far more money out of Verne’s books than the author did himself, Verne’s contract with Hetzel and Company meant he could give up his unsuccessful career as a stockbroker and devote himself to his writing. Hetzel’s son Louis-Jules, who took over the publishing firm on his father’s death, continued to honour Verne’s contract.

Hetzel launched his educational family magazine Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation in 1864 and its first issue included the opening instalments of Verne’s Les Voyages et Aventures du Captaine Hatteras (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras), a two-volume novel about polar exploration. Most of Verne’s novels were first serialised in periodicals before being published in book-form and many of them appeared in Hetzel’s Magasin including Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Jean Jules-Verne, in his biography of his grandfather, wrote that Verne ‘did not realize at the time… that by linking his fate with that of Magasin he was limiting himself as a writer; but later on he came to regret having to edit his work to avoid shocking his young readers’.

In 1869 Verne rented a house in Amiens, settling there permanently in 1872. The money made from the bestselling Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingt Jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) and a financially beneficial renegotiation of the terms of his contract with Hetzel provided the means for an occasionally extravagant lifestyle involving the purchasing of yachts, the holding of grand fancy dress balls and, in 1882, a move to a larger house in Amiens. Jean Jules-Verne says that Honorine’s ‘drawing-room was a focal point for the social life of Amiens’. Honorine enjoyed being part of the town’s social-round and Verne was happy to indulge her, although having made a brief, polite appearance at her soirées he would soon withdraw to the peace of his study to work.

In 1886 his comfortable life took a downward turn. Although his books were still selling well, the more he earned, the more he spent. Unwilling to ask Honorine to cut back on her household extravagances he sold his yacht Saint-Michel on 15 February. The following month, Verne’s favourite nephew, Gaston, a brilliant and serious-minded student, shot his uncle in a fit of madness, causing serious injuries to Verne’s foot that left the author permanently lame. Gaston’s father, Paul, wrote to his brother-in-law Léon Guillon:

What a frightful misfortune! I have just returned from Amiens where I saw poor Gaston, who had been taken to the hospital infirmary at the request of his uncle. The poor dear child has no consciousness of the act that he has committed. He says that he wanted to attract attention to his uncle in order to gain him a seat in the Académie – that is the only explanation that anyone has been able to get from him. The public attorney and the doctors with whom I talked have declared him totally irresponsible; he is going to be put in a home…

Ah, my dear friend! What a cruel day! I cannot believe my misfortune!

Until this incident Gaston had seemed to be a model youth in comparison with Verne’s troublesome son Michel who had caused problems for the family throughout his childhood. Michel’s own son, Jean Jules-Verne, describes his father’s adolescence as a ‘period of obnoxious hobbledehoydom’ during which he ‘mixed with undesirables and got into debt… and whenever his family tried to intervene he became insolent and rebellious’. In 1878 a desperate Verne obtained an order committing Michel to prison until it was possible to send him to sea on a ship bound for India. In March 1880 Michel caused a scandal by eloping with an actress appearing at the municipal theatre. Further distress was caused when in 1883 Michel abandoned his wife and ran off with a sixteen year-old music student called Jeanne. He and Jeanne had two children together before his divorce was finalised. Gradually, under the calming influence of Jeanne, Michel settled down and became close to his father, particularly as Verne’s increasing ill-health began to take its toll. Jean Jules-Verne recalled ‘the two having long conversations… about the book that Verne was currently writing’. When Verne died in 1905 his son Michel completed his father’s unfinished manuscripts ensuring ‘new’ work by Verne came into print.