The author sifts through evidence that depicts Austen not as a modest, retiring daughter, but rather as a rebellious, satirical, and wild woman. -- Back cover.

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz? In this graceful introduction to the author's life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen's six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron - full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.

"This book presents Jane Austen's life and works in a beautifully illustrated volume, taking a thematic, all-encompassing look at this most brilliant of writers and the society that shaped her work"--Front dust jacket flap.

A trip back to the world of Jane Austen and the homes she lived in with noted historian Lucy Worsley.

A fresh approach to building the life of Jane Austen through her letters, demonstrating that a well-known life can be reframed by being grounded in evidence of that life The Life of the Author: Jane Austen takes readers on a literary-biographical journey through Austen's life in letters. Using a unique non-linear approach, author Catherine Delafield explores three frames for Austen's literary life—family, correspondents, and fiction—to suggest new pathways for the interpretation of life writing about one of the most popular and influential English novelists of all time. Delafield addresses multiple aspects of Austen's epistolary practice and the ways in which her letters, juvenile writings, and unpublished novels have been overlaid on both biography and fiction. Throughout the text, special attention is paid to the changing view of women’s correspondence as personal record and to Cassandra Austen's role as editor of her sister’s surviving letters. The book opens with selected readings from Austen's letters and a review of the family treatment of the life. Subsequent chapters discuss the female circle of correspondents in both extant and missing letters, the letter content and structure of Austen's novels, the use of letters as representations of places and spaces based on Austen's own lived experience of epistolary communication, and more. Discusses how the letters, correspondents, and novels supplement Jane Austen’s fiction and substantiate her life Highlights Austen's use of the letter as a conversation on paper, rather than as an autobiographical tool Explores the letters within Austen's fictional writing as well as recipes, accounts, and needlework with links to the letters Features a select chronology using letters as landmarks, tables representing surviving letters by correspondent, and family trees tracing names and relationships The Life of the Author: Jane Austen is an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the novel, women's writing, British writing, and life writing, as well as for general readers with interest in gaining new perspectives on Austen's chronological life and literary output.

At her death in 1817, Jane Austen left the world six of the most beloved novels written in English—but her shortsighted family destroyed the bulk of her letters; and if she kept any diaries, they did not survive her. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin, author of A Life of My Own, has filled the gaps in the record, creating a remarkably fresh and convincing portrait of the woman and the writer. While most Austen biographers have accepted the assertion of Jane's brother Henry that "My dear Sister's life was not a life of events," Tomalin shows that, on the contrary, Austen's brief life was fraught with upheaval. Tomalin provides detailed and absorbing accounts of Austen's ill-fated love for a young Irishman, her frequent travels and extended visits to London, her close friendship with a worldly cousin whose French husband met his death on the guillotine, her brothers' naval service in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies, and thus shatters the myth of Jane Austen as a sheltered and homebound spinster whose knowledge of the world was limited to the view from a Hampshire village.