The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
Written by Paula Byrne
Narrated by Louise Hulland
5/5
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About this audiobook
Since her death , people have got Jane Austen wrong. The real Jane – revealed for the first time in this landmark biography – was a less cosy, more spiky, more modern figure than she is usually imagined to be. Far from retelling a familiar story, Byrne’s book uses new research and new techniques to give us Jane Austen for the 21st century.
Paula Byrne – an internationally renowned Jane Austen scholar and a best-selling biographer – has uncovered a very different Jane Austen to the Jane of popular imagination.
This Jane is a woman deeply immersed in the culture around her, but also far ahead of her time in her independence and tough-mindedness.. Throughout, this audio-book gives the sense of Austen as an astute commentator on human nature in general and her own age in particular, and above all as a writer of independence and ambition.
Each chapter is focussed on a key moment in Austen’s life: eg. when her handicapped brother is removed from the family, when her exotic cousin Eliza arrives in the family circle, when her aunt was arrested for shoplifting, her time alone in London. The book also gives detailed attention to the novels themselves.
After this book, no longer can Austen be viewed as someone who did not engage with the great political events of her time. How many lovers of her work are aware that the Prince Regent kept a debauched household down the road from her village, that she was related by marriage to other major literary figures of the time such as the libertine Gothic novelist William Beckford and her favourite poet George Crabbe. The book will also identify her long lost seaside love as well as argue that her assumed ‘genteel’ sense of humour could also be savage, highly subversive irony.
Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne is the author the bestselling biographies ‘Perdita’, ‘Mad World’, ‘The Real Jane Austen’, ‘Belle’, ‘Kick’ and ‘The Genius of Jane Austen’. She is founder and chief executive of ReLit, the Bibliotherapy Foundation, a charity devoted to the mental health benefits of reading. She is married to Sir Jonathan Bate and lives in Oxford.
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Reviews for The Real Jane Austen
3 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent non-traditional biography filled with fascinating background detail and context to Jane Austen's life and work. It was thrilling to learn so much in this one book that was new to me about Austen and her extended circle. This is a real a tribute to Paula Byrne, as I've been a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America for years, read several previous biographies as well as the six novels (repeatedly), and attended Austen conferences. But now I'm seeing Austen's work in a new light thanks to Paula Byrne's creative approach. Highly recommended to all, whether you've read Jane Austen before or not.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Such a good book. I found myself dragging my feet on the last chapter and epilogue because I didn't want to be finished. Wonderful, clever concept to use significant artifacts to move the biography along and to more clearly illuminate Austen's life and works. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and recommend it highly!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an interesting book for fans of Jane Austen. It should not be the first biography that one reads, since it does not move through her life in a conventional manner and expects a certain amount of knowledge about her life. Instead, it enriches one's understanding of her life by focussing on an item that she would have been familiar with, and enlarges upon its associations with her life. I thought that it was very interesting and gave me a much better feel for Jane Austen as a person. The problem with biographies of famous people is that there is so much material that the book focusses entirely on their public life and accomplishments, and I am very grateful to Byrne for this different approach.For a basic biography, I would recommend Carol Shield's Jane Austen : a life, which is a reliable 120 page account of her life, although it lacks a bibliography. My current favorite among long biographies is John Halperin's The Life of Jane AustenThere are a variety of "specialized" books that focus on Jane Austen life such as Nigel Nicolson and Stephen Colover's The World of Jane Austen: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction which 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 which people who enjoy this book would probably also like.