It was good to become reacquainted with Austen and her family, to become lost in the complexity of her extended family relationships and to immerse myself in the influences on her writing. This weekend, I re-read it in two sittings. Although I have re-read Austen's novels in the intervening years, I have not looked at the biography again. After that albeit rather limited literary pilgrimage, it seemed appropriate to acquire and read a biography of the writer while I was still in what had been her environment. I purchased and first read this book in Bath in 1999, after visiting Chawton (where Austen lived in the latter part of her life and wrote her last three novels) and Salisbury (where she died and was buried). Tomalin provides detailed and absorbing accounts of Austen's ill-fated love for a young Irishman, her frequent travels and extended visits to London, her close friendship with a worldly cousin whose French husband met his death on the guillotine, her brothers' naval service in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies, and thus shatters the myth of Jane Austen as a sheltered and homebound spinster whose knowledge of the world was limited to the view from a Hampshire village. While most Austen biographers have accepted the assertion of Jane's brother Henry that 'My dear Sister's life was not a life of events,' Tomalin shows that, on the contrary, Austen's brief life was fraught with upheaval. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin has filled the gaps in the record, creating a remarkably fresh and convincing portrait of the woman and the writer. (Biography).At her death in 1817, Jane Austen left the world six of the most beloved novels written in English-but her shortsighted family destroyed the bulk of her letters and if she kept any diaries, they did not survive her. The Jane Austen who emerges from Claire Tomalin's biography is a slightly different figure, however - a woman who lived on the edges of the society she described, looking in at it from the outside'.

Or so generations of admiring readers have supposed. It is a world she knew because it was the world she herself inhabited. 'The six great novels of Jane Austen picture a world of civility, reassuring stability and continuity. The spine of the dust jacket is lightly sunned and there is a faint small spot to the fore-edge. Illustrated endpapers, frontispiece, photographs, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index.

Jane austen a life claire tomalin