The author of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and other comedies of manners gets a biography similar in tone to her own books: intelligent but not intellectual, witty without being nasty. Claire Tomalin, author of four previous biographies of notable British women, treats Jane Austen (1775-1817) with the respect her genius deserves. Tomalin eschews gossip and speculation in favor of a sober account of the writer's life that nonetheless sparkles with sly humor. Perceptive analyses of each of Austen's novels, with autobiographical links suggested but never insisted upon, add to the value of Jane Austen: A Life.


From Library Journal
Despite only a few surviving personal papers and letters, no autobiographical notes, and no diaries written by Jane Austen, attempts to piece together the life and personality of the author abound. An experienced biographer, Tomalin makes do by focusing more on the Austen family, acquaintances, and friends than on Austen herself, forthrightly acknowledging, "It is only because of her writing that we think them worth remembering; and yet she is at almost every point harder to summon up than any of them...she is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky." Like David Nokes's recent biography, Jane Austen (LJ 9/1/97), Tomalin's presents an engaging story of the life and times of the Austen family. Although Tomalin's biography is not as detailed as Nokes's, it offers a freshness in its attention to, and compassion regarding the child-rearing practices of the Austens, the physical demands on child-bearing women, and to the portrayal of Austen's will, determination, and energy in her final days. Recommended for literature collections for its perspective and minimal speculations.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New Yorker
...brisk and sparkling--a page-turner, in fact...


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
In her marvelous new biography of Austen, the English writer Claire Tomalin strips away this mythology to reveal a tough, humorous and highly resourceful woman. She not only depicts a life that was considerably more worldly than commonly supposed, but also delineates an emotional experience "full of events, of distress and even trauma," which permanently shaped Austen's apprehension of the world.... Writing in vivid, authoritative prose, she does a masterly job of delineating the complex emotional mathematics of the Austen clan, showing us the bonds of rivalry, affection and dependence that linked Jane with her sister and six brothers, and their myriad cousins.... Ms. Tomalin has pulled off something very difficult: She has written a biography that reflects Austen's own exacting standards, a book that radiates intelligence, wit and insight.


From AudioFile
This is a beautifully lucid and balanced biography in which the biographer is not afraid to appear as a personality. The text is always informed by a keen, but never obsessive, awareness of what can and cannot be known about an intensely private and not very well documented individual. Donada Peters would, one senses, read an Austen novel splendidly. Occasional quotations hint at a considerable command of character voices. She is an ideal voice for this biography, which is written with Austen-like clarity and which wears its solid scholarship lightly. Here is an ideal companion to an Austen collection. J.N. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
The second major Austen biography of the season expertly places the great novelist in her historical moment, without attempting to fully plumb her psyche. Austen, writes Tomalin (The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 1991, etc.), ``has a way of sending biographers away feeling that, as Lord David Cecil put it, she remains `as no doubt she would have wished--not an intimate but an acquaintance.' '' Tomalin does indeed fall short of conveying the kind of three-dimensional portrait so painstakingly achieved by David Nokes in his recent Austen biography (p. 1012). She speculates on how the novelist's sojourn with a village wet nurse affected her in infancy, on how she handled heartbreak as an adult, and on the impact of the various family crises that marked her later life--guesswork being of the essence for the Austen biographer, given that most of her correspondence was destroyed by her family after her death. But Tomalin doesn't convince with her tentative explanations of what made Austen tick. Be it somewhat lacking in depth, however, the sketch of the famous author that emerges from Tomalin's unassuming, lucid, and concise account of Austen's family life and of her meteoric rise to fame in her last years does do justice to the integrity of her complex character. Her mobile intelligence and biting humor come across smartly. What's more, Tomalin offers impressive accounts of the evolution and meanings of Austen's novels, and of how she and her works related to their literary antecedents, from Samuel Johnson to the popular novelist Charlotte Smith, and to their historical context of revolution and war. Nice historical detailing--attention, for example, to the expense of the paper on which Austen wrote--adds period flavor. Recommended for those seeking a brief introduction to Austen's life, times, and work; those wishing to burrow deep into the author's consciousness will want to consult Nokes. (16 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen - the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed unfailing loyalty and, in the conduct of her own life, unfailing bravery. Jane Austen's family existed on the very fringe of the world she described in her fiction, struggling to get ahead with little money and no land in the competitive society of Georgian England, sometimes succeeding but often failing with painful consequences. New research in family papers has yielded a rich, tragi-comic picture of the Austen clan - their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances, their exotic connections with India and France. At the same time, Tomalin's explorations in local archives reveal a surprising view of the neighbors the family lived among in Hampshire, more extravagant and eccentric by far than anyone depicted in Austen's books. But it is in the deeply human portrait of Jane Austen herself that this biography excels. The honesty and directness of her personality (perfect heroines made her "sick and wicked"), her strength in giving up a chance at marriage to follow the path her vocation as a writer required her to take, the warmth and long consistency of her relationship with her sister, Cassandra, the poignancy of her death - Claire Tomalin here captures the living character of a great writer who is read, re-read, read again, and adored, now more than ever.

SYNOPSIS

A look at the life of Jane Austen that suggests that her novels were based less on experience and more on brilliant artifice.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Tomalin (The Invisible Woman) solves the problem of preparing yet another biography of Jane Austen (1775-1817), a "life of no event," by a familiar formula. At every turn, one meets "may have," "may be" and "might have." A biographical boon is the large supporting cast. Tomalin takes 100 pages to get Austen to age 18 by filling in the pages with stories about her relatives and neighbors in Hampshire. An entire chapter is devoted to a single Austen letterand because few of her letters survive, Tomalin suggests that in some years, in a letter-writing age, Austen wrote none whatsoever. Such apparent silences are suffused with hypotheses about her dreary existence during the long gaps between her teenage novelizing and her shrewd, mature works like Emma and Mansfield Park, which followed the much-delayed publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Tomalin is strikingly sensitive, however, to Austen's life of social discomfort. In what is a very personal book, she often resorts to the first person, which fits the speculative approach. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) FYI: For reviews of two other Austen biographies published this year, see Jane Austen by Valerie Grosvenor Myer in Nonfiction Forecasts (March 10) and Jane Austen by David Nokes (July 7).

Library Journal

Despite only a few surviving personal papers and letters, no autobiographical notes, and no diaries written by Jane Austen, attempts to piece together the life and personality of the author abound. An experienced biographer, Tomalin makes do by focusing more on the Austen family, acquaintances, and friends than on Austen herself, forthrightly acknowledging, "It is only because of her writing that we think them worth remembering; and yet she is at almost every point harder to summon up than any of them...she is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky." Like David Nokes's recent biography, Jane Austen (LJ 9/1/97), Tomalin's presents an engaging story of the life and times of the Austen family. Although Tomalin's biography is not as detailed as Nokes's, it offers a freshness in its attention to, and compassion regarding the child-rearing practices of the Austens, the physical demands on child-bearing women, and to the portrayal of Austen's will, determination, and energy in her final days. Recommended for literature collections for its perspective and minimal speculations.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.

AudioFile - John Niessink

This is a beautifully lucid and balanced biography in which the biographer is not afraid to appear as a personality. The text is always informed by a keen, but never obsessive, awareness of what can and cannot be known about an intensely private and not very well documented individual. Donada Peters would, one senses, read an Austen novel splendidly. Occasional quotations hint at a considerable command of character voices. She is an ideal voice for this biography, which is written with Austen-like clarity and which wears its solid scholarship lightly. Here is an ideal companion to an Austen collection. J.N. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

NY Times Book Review

Another one! Distinctive in its hypothesis that the incidents of Austen's life were far less trivial than they may look to us now.

Nancy Mairs