I've read about seven biographies of Jane Austen, and this would be the one that I recommend that anyone read first. It pretty much sums up all that is really known about Austen's life and avoids the usual hazards of wild speculation and dubious reinterpretation. It does not desperately attempt to break new ground but considers the presentation of a solid, readable account of the subject's life as sufficient grounds for its existence. This is not to say that I accept everything that Shields says, but she does a commendable job.

There is one serious problem with this biography but I believe that it is the decision of the publisher, not the author. There is almost nothing in the way of documentation: bibliographies, sources, notes. I do like the books that I have read in this series as a good introduction to the various people covered, and as far as I can tell, they are reliable, but one has to trust Penquin's reputation. They are not scholarly.

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Austen: A Companion, or Debra Teachman's Understanding Pride and Prejudice: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (The Greenwood Press "Literature in Context" Series), as a look at the author in context of her time.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 recent 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; 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.

As for the other biographies that I have read by Tomalin, Nokes, Park, etc., one can get a lot of additional detail about the life of a typical woman of Austen's class, as well as trivia such as the weather around the time of her birth (Make no mistake, I LOVE such details) but the books are often weighted down with pretentiousness, unfounded speculation, doubtful agendas and side interests of the authors. By all means, I recommend them to people with an intense interest in Jane Austen, but not for the person who just wants context for her writings. ( )

Jane Austen is such a popular author but relatively little is known about her because her sister Cassandra, with whom she was thought to be exceedingly close, destroyed most of Jane’s correspondence shortly after her death. She wanted everyone to remember her sister as angelic and agreeable as she thought her to be. Any biography written about an author long dead and reconstructed from sources and memories recorded many years after the fact is a challenge, but Carol Shields prevails and pulls together an interesting portrait of Austen which is at variance inn many respects to the characters and worlds that Austen explores in her novels. By comparison, Austen was poorer and with manner which were less refined than her characters, and she wrote carefully around circumstances in her life that may have accused her family unnecessary hurt. It is also a technique that she uses throughout, comparing the writer to her fiction. While you cane certainly approach and explore a life from that perspective, I’m not sure how accurate you end up portraying it.

Reading some of the sentences are awkward because as Shields admits in her narrative, it was hard to come to terms with what to call Jane Austen. For Shields, Jane seemed too familiar and Austen, too distant and cool, so she called her Jane Austen throughout much of the biography. I don’t know, it just seemed a little bit weird to me. And while I enjoyed reading this I couldn’t help but be reminded that so much of what is written has got to be conjecture and educated guess, and there were places where I couldn’t help rolling my eyes and thinking that no one could possibly know or be comfortable jumping to the reached conclusion. All things considered, I think this has been a great introduction to Jane Austen. I have a book of Austen’s letters. I may have to take a look and see what I come up with.

Boring biography
( )

Loved it. Was a good biography of Jane Austens life. Fast read as well. ( )

Very fresh and clear and wonderfully easy to read without being simplistic. It may not have all the background detail of Tomalin's biography, but I think Shields is better at getting into Jane's psyche (or as near as anyone can guess). Shields poses more questions about what Jane was like, but I'd rather that than a biographer make sweeping claims without admitting they might be wrong... [March 2002]