Park Honan cosponsors the Jane Austen London Group and has won many awards including a Guggenheim fellowship. His previous books include
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy,
Matthew Arnold: A Life, and
Shakespeare: A Life.
With access to newly discovered Austen family manuscripts, Honan creates in rich detail contexts for Jane Austen's life: familial, political, historical. Yet the person at the center is curiously absent. Austen's letters are used to convey facts about her daily life without sympathetic probing. What underlines Honan's difficulty with realizing this woman's everyday identity is his suspicion of its significance. He stresses her connection to the activities of her male relatives, especially her naval brothers, as if that is what gives her, and her art, credence. But what makes a naval war importantly real, and those "three or four Families in a Country Village" a "near-vacuum"? A misleading approach to a brilliant woman who lived and wrote about the experience of most women throughout history: domestic life. Suzanne Juhasz, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.