Austen is a medieval English form of Augustine — from the Latin augustus (great, majestic, venerable). Austen Lane — male; NFL defensive end. Austen Tichenor — male; Reduced Shakespeare Company member. Austin (1793-1836). The Austen spelling specifically honors the novelist and has surged in modern American naming as a literary-tribute choice.
Austen does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Austen reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.