Jane Austen: Her Life: The Definitive Portrait of Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Art, Her Family, Her World - Softcover

Honan, Park

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449903192 ISBN 13: 9780449903193

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1989

Synopsis

“The best biography Jane Austen has ever received.”—Newsweek

Park Honan’s highly acclaimed Jane Austen: Her Life is the biography that Austen—and her readers—have long deserved. Readers have long cherished the brilliant, ironic novels of Jane Austen and critics have ranked them with the masterpieces of world literature, but surprisingly, there had been no major biography of the novelist in more than seventy years.
 
Drawing on a treasure of new material, Honan reveals an Austen surprising in her knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars (two of her brothers fought in the British Navy and rose to the rank of admiral) and surprising as well in her romantic entanglements—an engagement that lasted but a night, a bold flirtation that very nearly erupted into scandal. Above all, Honan sheds new light on Austen’s social experience, giving new prominence to her large and fascinating family, and the Regency society in which she moved.
 
Readers of Jane Austen: Her Life will return to the novels not only with new understanding of the person who created them but with a vivid sense of the society from which they were drawn.
 
“A triumph . . . the only biography of Austen that she would have liked.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

About this title

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
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0449903192
• ISBN 13: 9780449903193
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 484