But, at least in the early part of her life, she seems to have had quite a hectic social life. Not knowing much about Jane Austen, I suppose I had imagined that she probably spent a lot of time at home on her own quietly writing and re-writing her novels – polishing her ‘two inches of ivory’ as she put it, living out her life as a respectable maiden aunt to numerous nieces and nephews. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews of Ms Tomalin’s books, the author has a very immersive style, so you don’t just get a chronological list of dates and events, you also get a fully rounded view of how (in this case) a single woman of modest means - as Jane Austen was for most of her life – lived in the eighteenth century what she might have seen, heard, thought about etc on different occasions during her life.Īlthough Jane Austen wrote thousands of letters, her family – mainly her sister Cressida and her niece Fanny – ruthlessly edited or destroyed many of them after her death, so in the absence of finding a long lost diary, the author has had to research long and hard to find unpublished sources to fill out the story as well as adding in some of her own reasonable speculation to fill in the gaps. This is another brilliant biography from Claire Tomalin and I really enjoyed reading it.
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