Jane Austen - Softcover

A sparklingly intelligent and intimate biography of one of Britain’s best-loved writers by the highly praised biographer of Swift: ‘The best biography of Swift to date.’ Michael Foot, Observer.

In this brilliant reassessment of an often misunderstood subject, David Nokes explores beneath the surface of Jane Austen’s outwardly calm existence to uncover the psychological dramas which shaped her fiction and forged her profound and knowing insight into human emotions. Re-examining the letters and documents of her life, as well as her novels, to trace the inner sources of the imaginative vitality and emotional power that animated her work, Nokes has produced an altogether more personal portrait than has ever been achieved before. He argues that the seductive power of Austen’s fiction comes from her intense, imaginative struggle to create images of harmony out of the disruptions and upheavals of her private life. Her novels, for all their triumphant artifice, betray many disturbing reminders of the frustrations of female hopes and the penalties of social dependency. This biography is an engaging, original and highly readable, a fitting testimony to the clergyman’s daughter whose novels rank among the world’s greatest literary works.

'Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.' Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight a few months before she died. Yet most traditional accounts of Jane Austen's life have insisted on portraying her as just such a picture of perfection. Her brother Henry described her as 'faultless...as nearly as human nature can be', and her sister Cassandra burned the majority of Jane Austen's private letters in order to preserve this image of her as a paragon of all the discreet and modest virtues.

In this new biography of Jane Austen, David Nokes has re-examined her life and presents a picture of her which is less than perfect but more full of dangerous excitement. Working from unpublished sources, he discloses the truth behind several disturbing Austen family secrets, and presents the conflicts in Jane Austen's mind between her love of rural tranquillity and her restless fascination with the lure of wealth and fame. As Jane Austen wrote in another of her letters, 'If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my fault.'