Life of Jane Austen

Despite a number of biographical studies, there is room for a critical biography of Austen whose main rationale is to explore how we might usefully make connections between Austen’s life and her to paraphrase the series guidelines, to demonstrate that her books are written by a woman who lived in a particular time and place. My aim, therefore, will be to tell the story of Austen’s life in an engaging and available idiom and with proper attention to the particularities of an individual existence, but to do so from perspectives which aid our understanding both of how Austen, as a woman of her social background at this historical period, became a writer, and of how she came to write as she did.