{"product_id":"jane-austen-a-life-paperback-1","title":"Jane Austen: A Life - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt 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. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin, author of \u003ci\u003eA Life of My Own\u003c\/i\u003e, has filled the gaps in the record, creating a remarkably fresh and convincing portrait of the woman and the writer. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhile 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. 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. \u003ch3\u003eFront Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere, 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. In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration. \u003cbr\u003eThe world she wrote about--that place of civility and reassuring stability--was never quite her own. As Tomalin shows, 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, tragicomic 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. We realize how much closer her genius lies, in its splendid artifice, to the great comic operas of Mozart than to the main tradition of the English novel. \u003cbr\u003eBut 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 ingiving 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, with unforgettable skill, the living character of a great writer who is read, reread, read again, and adored, now more than ever. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"From the Hardcover edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51306870669535,"sku":"9780679766766","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/npX19VNjIp9780679766766.webp?v=1788234736","url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/products\/jane-austen-a-life-paperback-1","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}