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Jane Austen A Life Claire Tomalin 9780679766766 Books

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Jane Austen A Life Claire Tomalin 9780679766766 Books

Conventional wisdom has it that Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen is the best out there. I would have to say that it depends on what you’re looking for in a biography.

Jane Austen is a bit of a tough subject. Unlike her contemporaries, Frances Burney and Mme de Staël, she did nothing in her life that would have attracted a historian’s notice, so the source material is all personal—her letters (heavily redacted by her sister) and the memories of her family (scrubbed of anything discomfiting during the course of the nineteenth century). When I was a student, there was little other than the texts of her novels to take you beyond those limits. After my academic years a series of biographies went further, and Tomalin’s is one of them. She has done a lot of digging into the papers, mostly unpublished, of Austen’s relatives, neighbors, and friends, and provides a much richer personal history than had previously been possible.

Her text is engaging and accessible, with little of the scholarly labor behind the work on view to the casual reader. She paints a vivid portrait of life in the Austen household, and throughout the book her strength lies in taking the reader into Austen’s quotidian experience. Her account of Austen’s childhood experiences was the liveliest, but also the most speculative, section and I did feel there was a tendency (all too common among biographers) to psychologize based on insufficient data.

Where the book felt thin to me was in the area of situating Austen’s work in her literary and cultural context. There are some passages of this sort, but they feel perfunctory. No worries; other authors have done a good job in this area, but the lack kept me from considering this the ultimate biography.


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Jane Austen A Life Claire Tomalin 9780679766766 Books Reviews

A highly readable, infinitely well-researched life of Austen. Especially impressive was the background on all the families in the Austen neighborhood. Superior grasp of time period and very insightful sympathy into what it must have been like for a gifted young Jane Austen to grow up female. A MUST for Austen lovers and scholars.
1997's "Jane Austen A Life" is Claire Tomalin's highly readable, even dramatic account of the life of the popular romance novelist. Jane Austen left little for her future biographers beyond her published novels and some surviving letters and manuscripts. Tomalin addresses Jane in the context of her large and interesting family and their Hampshire friends and relatives. The result doesn't necessarily add a great deal to our limited store of knowledge about Jane Austen; it does provide some interesting insights into her context, and should bury forever any concerns about the source of Austen's acute understanding of human nature or the material for her novels.

The good news about "Jane Austen A Life" is that Claire Tomalin is a gifted writer and her book will be a page-turner for many fans. Tomalin has done her extensive research. In addition, Tomalin is not shy about speculating when it comes to the signficant gaps in our knowledge of Austen's life. Her speculation is generally reasonable and plausible, and almost always fascinating to read. It is less clear how much of the book is reasonable inference from the limited record and how much edges toward historical fiction.

Tomalin includes her own literary criticism on Jane Austen's various works. This criticism is frankly hit or miss. Her comments on "Lady Susan" highlight its unusual leading character. Her analysis of the novel fragment "The Watson" explains why Jane Austen never finished it. However, she unfairly slights one of the main characters in "Sense and Sensibility", misreads the fate of Mr. Wickham and Lydia in "Pride and Prejudice", and perhaps misses the point of "Mansfield Park." Readers familiar with Jane Austen's novels can draw their own conclusions.

Jane Austen is as vivid as Claire Tomalin can make her in this biography, a clever, acutely observant woman who must on occasion have been a little intimidating in person. She is very much a family person, at the beck and call of brothers, cousins, nieces and nephews all her life. We come to appreciation for how difficult Austen's life was after her father died. Her failure to marry lfet her, her spinster sister Cassandra, and her widowed mother in genteel poverty, dependent on support from her brothers and with few choices about where and how they would live. Unfortunately, Jane's writing did not begin to produce real income before her early death in 1817.

"Jane Austen A Life" is highly recommended as an interesting, even dramatic biography. The book includes an excellent selection of portraits of Jane Austen's family members. It is perhaps ironic that the one verified portrait of Jane Austen in life was said by her family to be inadequate, just as the person behind the novels continues to be elusive to biographers and fans alike.
Excellent biography. I learned a great deal about Austen and her time, which go hand in hand. Ms. Tomalin seems to be telling the story with ease and then you look at the notes to see the tremendous research behind it all .( which is where the ease comes from ) Ms. Tomalin has read about and thought about and read Austen for a long time and has distilled it beautifully in her book Those authors written about Ms. Tomalin are lucky
This book is very valuable for a Jane Austen enthusiast, such as myself. It has brought Jane to life in ways I hadn't realized previously, a thorough, engaging study, to be sure. Its family tree note is part of its very valuable note-system, with its detailed indexing is also to be praised. I only objected to some of Claire's views of Jane's characters, so a reader needs to be prepared for some possibly disputable comments in that respect. Describing Fannie Price in Mansfield Part as a "prig" is a serious misunderstanding of that character, in my view, as one example. But this is minor against the extensive and well-arranged bio--strongly recommended. It was also interesting to read what people close to her thought of her stories, with Emma not doing so well against Pride and Prejudice, whereas Emma is now likely her masterpiece. This study also redoubles the understanding that Jane was a forerunner into modern realism, and as fine a writer as we're likely to find.
Conventional wisdom has it that Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen is the best out there. I would have to say that it depends on what you’re looking for in a biography.

Jane Austen is a bit of a tough subject. Unlike her contemporaries, Frances Burney and Mme de Staël, she did nothing in her life that would have attracted a historian’s notice, so the source material is all personal—her letters (heavily redacted by her sister) and the memories of her family (scrubbed of anything discomfiting during the course of the nineteenth century). When I was a student, there was little other than the texts of her novels to take you beyond those limits. After my academic years a series of biographies went further, and Tomalin’s is one of them. She has done a lot of digging into the papers, mostly unpublished, of Austen’s relatives, neighbors, and friends, and provides a much richer personal history than had previously been possible.

Her text is engaging and accessible, with little of the scholarly labor behind the work on view to the casual reader. She paints a vivid portrait of life in the Austen household, and throughout the book her strength lies in taking the reader into Austen’s quotidian experience. Her account of Austen’s childhood experiences was the liveliest, but also the most speculative, section and I did feel there was a tendency (all too common among biographers) to psychologize based on insufficient data.

Where the book felt thin to me was in the area of situating Austen’s work in her literary and cultural context. There are some passages of this sort, but they feel perfunctory. No worries; other authors have done a good job in this area, but the lack kept me from considering this the ultimate biography.