A Piece of Single Blessedness

John Burrows

  • Jane Austen: Her Life by Park Honan
    Weidenfeld, 452 pp, £16.95, October 1987, ISBN 0 297 79217 2

The publication of three substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their concepts of literary biography.

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[*] James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) has just been reprinted by Century, with an iconoclastic introduction by Fay Weldon (235 pp., £4.95, October 1987, 0 7126 1702 7).