John Burrows

John Burrows is a professor of English at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. He is the author of Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method, which was reviewed by Marilyn Butler last June.

A Piece of Single Blessedness

John Burrows, 21 January 1988

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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