Jane Austen: Her Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904435815 ISBN 13: 9781904435815

Publisher: Little Books, 2008

Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters written by members of the Austen family,this sympathetic and probing biography enters the private world of Jane Austen,  revealing experiences and observations she drew upon to write such masterpieces as Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Austen's childhood is recreated, sketching her devotion to her ambitious parents and drawing a lively picture of Jane's two brothers—one of whom served with Nelson's navy at Trafalgar—and of Jane's closest confidante, her elder sister Cassandra. Set against a backdrop of rural Hampshire and Bath, Austen's life moves between a closely observed domestic setting with family and friends to descriptions of dances and parties, social mores, and malice. This account brings new insights into her checkered love life, her moments of loneliness and frustration, and her ironic appreciation of her situation as an intelligent, economically dependent woman.

About the Author:

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.

From Library Journal:

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
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