Jane Austen the Woman: Some Biographical Insights - Softcover

Tucker, George Holbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312126883 ISBN 13: 9780312126889

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995

Synopsis

By focusing on the woman rather than the author, George Tucker paints a new and welcome picture of Jane Austen: not the spinster recluse of previous biographies, but a vibrant, well-traveled woman who was very much a part of the world in which she lived.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Instead of the promised revelations from hitherto censored materials offering a more ``vibrant'' Jane Austen, Tucker assembles a reference guide to Austen's life, a genealogy of her relatives, friends, some people she never met at all, and gossip long since refuted. Readers who savor connectedness, relationships, coincidence, and triviality may appreciate this reference guide to Austen's social life, already depicted ironically in her novels. Here are the provincial towns (Steventon, Bath, Southampton, and Chawton), the flirtations, friends, cousins, scandals, the places she traveled (not far, not many), her religious practices, and the people she almost knew, that literary demimonde of Regency England. William Beckford's uncle was married to her brother's wife's aunt; another aunt's cousin was a friend of George Crabbe; an uncle's barrister was William Cowper's confidante; and seven years after Austen's death, Byron's body lay in state in her niece's London parlor. Austen's neighbors at Steventon, like her neighbors everywhere, their houses' lineages, occupations, and marriages are delineated with the same care and affection as are the men she flirted with, didn't marry, and even the women they didn't marry. These men had the unlikely names of Digweed, Fowle, Heartley, and Powlett; there's an unsubstantiated rumor of a summer romance with John Wordsworth, the brother of the poet. Tucker (a Virginia-based journalist and author of A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family, not reviewed) describes Austen's interest in private theatricals, piano, art, dancing, her attitude toward the foppish prince regent, her reading, and her interest in the scandals, suicides, affairs, elopements, and petty crimes of friends and relatives. The very kind of pedantry that elicited Austen's most stinging satire, reproducing the whole petty and suffocating social network her fiction indicts. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Tucker (A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family, LJ 4/15/84) aims here to replace the portrait biographers have painted of Austen as a parochial, reclusive, pious woman with a more realistic image that emphasizes Austen's vibrant, satirical, independent temperament. Making no attempt to address Austen's work except in brief passing references, Tucker creates a context for Austen's character and life. He arranges his book not chronologically but topically, devoting a chapter each to Austen's romances, travels, and views of religion and the political events of her time. This arrangement leads to some redundancies. More significantly, the text is at times mechanical, speculation is used rather heavily, and some of the chapters stray quite far from any direct link with Austen's life. Not a place to begin a relationship with Austen or her work, this book is suited for exhaustive Austen collections.
Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0312126883
• ISBN 13: 9780312126889
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288