Jane Austen: (Lives)

In this charming book, the prizewinning novelist Carol Shields, whose novels have themselves been compared to the works of Jane Austen, gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time. Jane Austen was born in 1775 in the remote Hampshire village of Steventon. Her parents, George Austen, Rector of Steventon, and his wife, Cassandra Leigh Austen, belonged to what was then called the lesser gentry. They were never financially secure but their education and family connections meant they were not at a disadvantage when set beside their wealthier neighbours. Jane Austen spent the first 25 years of her life in Steventon and the last eight in nearby Chawton, and did most of her writing in these two places. She never married although many of her novels are about marriage, and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra. Whilst not unaware of the larger political and social goings-on at the time, she chose a small canvas for her novels, preferring to focus on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature. Sir Walter Scott praised the delicate observation and fine judgement in her novels, which she herself characterised as 'the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour'. She died in 1817 at the age of 42, having just begun to find fame as a novelist. Jane Austen's life remains fairly opaque: she kept no diary that we know of, there is no voice recording such as we possess for Virginia Woolf and no photograph as there is of George Eliot. 160 Austen letters survive but none written earlier than her 20th year. In spite of this Carol Shields has written a wonderfully observant biography of this remarkable writer whose characters are as alive today in their longings as they were two hundred years ago, when Austen first gave them breath.

About the Author :
Carol Shields was born and brought up in Chicago, and has lived in Canada since 1957. She is the Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg.

Review :
Not much is really known about the life of Jane Austen. But that, of course, has not prevented big 'lives' of her being written. The latest and probably best (by David Nokes) weighed in at more than 500 pages. Nokes is an academic, Carol Shields a novelist - and her 200-page biography does not claim to come up with original research. Instead it combines a survey of the life with some more than incidental reflections on the art of the novel and is a very readable introduction to the work of the woman who actually had to pay to get Sense and Sensibility published! Perhaps Shields is a little simplistic in describing her work as "not a piece of reportage from the society of a particular past, but a wise and compelling exploration of human nature", for the question of her context is more complex than that. And a little eccentric when noticing that toes (yes, toes) are not mentioned in her novels. But this is a useful and refreshing book.