Caroline Sanderson

This is a short biography of the great author, covering her personal as well as literary life, and serves as a useful introduction to her world, with just the right amount of detail presented in a straightforward narrative. It supplemented what I learned at the Jane Austen museum in Bath last Sunday. The author challenges the common perception that Jane strongly disliked Bath, pointing to evidence in her own words, and in those of some of her characters, that points in both directions; it should also be remembered that her memories of the city would have been understandably soured by her last home in one of the poorer districts of the city, after the family was forced into relative poverty following the death of her father. The later moves to Southampton and then to her final home at Chawton in Hampshire unlocked the most creative period of her tragically short life which saw the final publication of her first novels during the last six years of her life, when she was finally able to find the physical space to be creative. Hers was a long-lived family, with almost all her siblings and her mother living into their seventies or eighties, but not for Jane, who sadly died at the age of 41, after battling illness for a year or more, and is now buried in Winchester Cathedral.… (més)

This is a short (115 p. main text) biography of Jane Austen. One might read it as an introduction to her before going on to more detailed biographies, or to learn more than an encyclopedia article, without reading a long book. This should satisfy either ambition. I have to say that I like Carol Shields biography, also Jane Austen, better, as it is a little more information dense. Of course the reader may prefer this because it is a little simpler. This also has some very nice features that the other doesn't, like a bibliography, and, even more impressive to me, a list of web sites dealing Jane Austen. Also consider checking out young adult biographies, which tend to be illustrated.

I would recommend that the reader next consider David Cecil's Portrait of Jane Austen or Josephine Ross' Jane Austen: A Companion, or Debra Teachman's Understanding Pride and Prejudice: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents , as a look at the author in context of her time. Ross' book has a nice selected bibliography of different types of Jane Austen studies and Teachman has extensive bibliographies of specialized topics. The movie, Becoming Jane, was inspired by Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen I enjoyed both book and movie,

The interested reader should also realize that there are a variety of "specialty" books that focus on narrow topics. Nigel Nicolson and Stephen Colover's The World of Jane Austen: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction focuses on houses and places she lived in or visited; it has an advantage over books on Regency architecture because it shows the different houses extant at the time, not just the most fashionable. Audrey Hawkridge's Jane and Her Gentlemen: Jane Austen and the Men in Her Life and Novels considers the men in JA's life versus the men in her novels.… (més)