Jane Austen: A Life

Please AMAZON, look into this matter, I have received a xerox copy of this book "JANE AUSTEN A LIFE BY CLAIR. WHY THESE book STORES gives fake xoreox books to customar? I am totally disspointed and going to cancel all my 3 books on the way.

Tomalin has managed to produce a convincingly thorough of Jane Austen based on what appears to be exhaustive research given the sketchy data that is available.

This is a brilliant biography of Jane Austen; I anticipated it would be, as I read the author's biography of Dickens back in 2012. She combines excellent, detailed research with an ability to tell a story of the subject's life that combines colour, incident and intelligent speculation based on her sources. This is more than just a literary biography, but also a history of the Austen and Leigh families, tracing their history back to the late 17th century; one of her great uncles born in the 17th century survived until Jane's teenage years. George Austen's clerical life combined with Cassandra Leigh's aristocratic descent in a successful marriage that produced six sons and two daughters. Jane was the shortest lived in a family that generally avoided the early mortality of most large families at that time and for long afterwards. There were plenty of scandals and jealousies and tensions as in all families, though Jane seems to have attempted to get on with all factions. Her literary career was very uneven, with her producing lots of short stories and poems from her teenage years, and before her 25th birthday having already written the first versions of what would later be published as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and (after her death) Northanger Abbey. Then she wrote almost nothing in the first decade of the 19th century, a decade punctuated by the death of her father, and moves around the country, including an unhappy period in Bath, before her final literary period in Chawton, near Winchester. In this small village her activities are described by the author as "making the very modest house into one of the great sites of literary history" - in a period of just six years Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813 – and three further novels were written here, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion (Northanger Abbey was written earlier in the 1790s). She also wrote the first 12 chapters of a new novel which was eventually published as Sanditon over a century later. Her early death at the age of 41 in 1817 in Winchester deprived the world of a great literary talent - if she had lived into her 70s as did her father and most of her siblings (and her mother lived to 87) just imagine what further works would have flowed from her pen. A great biography.

Very informative, engaging and a jolly good read. I recommend it to everyone with an interest in her life and oeuvre

I’m reading the book and I think it is really interesting and well written!

Tomalin has obviously done an amazing amount of research into her subject, though sometimes she tends to begin to insert her own ideas of what Jane was thinking, feeling or doing at certain points, which I found a bit annoying. However, though this happened quite regularly, it didn't become so invasive that I had to stop reading, as I have with other biographies in the past.