Jane Austen: Her Life (Phoenix Giants) (Paperback)

From the grim realities of life in the Navy as experienced by two of her brothers (who both went on to become Admirals) to the world class flirting of her cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza la comtesse de Feuillide - a favourite at the French court before the revolution and whose husband le comte lost his head to Madame la Guillotine in 1792 - to the satirical, Tory magazine published by her eldest brothers during their student days - and to which she apparently submitted letters critical of their magazine's ambivalent attitudes to women when she was thirteen, critisism they listened to - he demonstrates the wide range of influences on her view of the world and its expression through her art. We are given touching, hilarious and delightfully tangible clues to some of her themes, characterisations and jokes : Miss Taylor, Emma's governess whose indulgent treatment of her young charge was the cause of some much trouble for the village of Highbury was named for a fiery Spanish wine drunk by officers at Portsdown and anglicised from Mistella - as they said, Miss Taylor only tended to spoil one.

The devoted relationship between the sisters (known in the family as The Girls), Cassandra and Jane, is given its proper place, with Cassandra recognised as being in effect Jane's editor, although her advice (she thought Fanny Price ought to have accepted Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park) was sometimes ignored. Henry Austen's pride and enthusiasm for his sister's work was a source of gratitude and irritation for Jane when he couldn't help revealing the secret of her identity as the author of those remarkable novels everyone was talking about while visiting friends in Scotland. After her death he continued to promote her work, ensuring the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, with his own short and rather sanitised biographical notice attached. The attitude of her eldest brother James, however, was very different. He regarded novels as Whiggish and dangerous, writing a poem after her death which more or less said "we loved her despite the fact that she was the greatest novelist of all time". The two had flaming rows on his visits to Chawton, occasioned, as it seems to me, by fury on her part that his anti-intellectual second wife had beaten him into a dullness which was in stark contrast to his younger, satirical self, and a sort of unconscious artistic jealousy on his (he fancied himself as a poet but never achieved anything to rival Jane's success).

Jane Austen's courage and philosophy in facing her long, messy and painful death (probably from cancer - Eliza and her aunt died prematurely of the same disease) at the age of forty-one is inspirational. In the last months of her life she began a new novel, an adaptation of Northanger Abbey, where the young woman mislead by gothic novels is replaced by a young man lead astray by romantic poetry. It remains unfinished, but a testament to her tenacious spirit. Thank you, Park Honan, for bringing her back to life for a moment and allowing us to discover the real Jane Austen.