Jane Austen: Her Life

“The best biography Jane Austen has ever received.”—Newsweek

Park Honan’s highly acclaimed Jane Austen: Her Life is the biography that Austen—and her readers—have long deserved. Readers have long cherished the brilliant, ironic novels of Jane Austen and critics have ranked them with the masterpieces of world literature, but surprisingly, there had been no major biography of the novelist in more than seventy years.
 
Drawing on a treasure of new material, Honan reveals an Austen surprising in her knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars (two of her brothers fought in the British Navy and rose to the rank of admiral) and surprising as well in her romantic entanglements—an engagement that lasted but a night, a bold flirtation that very nearly erupted into scandal. Above all, Honan sheds new light on Austen’s social experience, giving new prominence to her large and fascinating family, and the Regency society in which she moved.
 
Readers of Jane Austen: Her Life will return to the novels not only with new understanding of the person who created them but with a vivid sense of the society from which they were drawn.
 
“A triumph . . . the only biography of Austen that she would have liked.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer