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Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin offers a radical re-assessment of arguably the nation’s favourite author in her account of the life of Jane Austen. There is no room her for the prim, endearing and content ‘Aunt Jane’ that was the core of her image for most of the 20th century. In tracing Austen’s life from her birth in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775 to her untimely death in 1817, Tomalin reveals first a home-loving child unhappily sent away to school and then an independent minded young woman who resents her dependence on wealthier relatives and prizes the rare times when she has the luxury of leisure to write.

Eminently readable, this biography places Austen not only within a family and locality, reveals the extent to which her connections provided close links to the politics and social trends of her times. Aunt to the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal and the loving cousin of a French émigré, Austen had no opportunity to live a life constrained to the round of local society. Tomalin shows that, schooled with the sons of West Indian slave owners and her father the trustee of an Antiguan sugar plantation, Austen cannot have been unaware of the contemporary debates on abolition and chattel slavery, as some her most ardent admirers would have it. Tomalin’s brief but thorough analysis of each of Austen’s major work’s shows how such issues, fair from absent from Austen’s novels, are subtlety worked through by a sophisticated and socially aware, professional author.

One of the real delights of this book is the account of the all too brief time in which Austen could enjoy the fruits of her talents, following the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: the small income she derived from her novels gave her a degree of personal freedom while the recognition of friends and family provided satisfaction, even if the limited public recognition she obtained made her uneasy.

Many of Austen’s letters and her diaries were destroyed by her family – her sister Cassandra and, later, her niece, Fanny, but Tomalin exploits the available material to the full, studying not only what is left of Austen’s correspondence and notes but also the correspondence and journals of those who knew or met her. And yet this is more than a mere history. With intelligence and sympathetic deduction and Tomalin provides a more rounded, and more credible, picture of her subject than many Austen biographers have managed, something which amounts to a fresh, revealing and intimate biography.