The incomparable Jane Austen, who perfected, if she did not invent, the novel of ordinary life, continues to enchant each new generation of readers. She is the only novelist of her era whose complete works are still read with pleasure. In spite of lapse of time, and enormous changes, we readily become inhabitants of her small world', writes Douglas Bush, author of this thoroughly delightful and carefully documented critical biography, which appears in the year marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen's birth.
The study begins with a glance at the facts, traditions, and attitudes which were part of the social fabric of her time, a time when a genteel young woman had only three prospects: marriage, ageing spinsterhood at home, becoming a teacher or governess. Jane Austen's own life brought few dramatic events, but there were many actors on her small domestic stage, and she was to choose as the milieu for her books the one in which she was so thoroughly at home. Her father, a scholarly clergyman in the village of Steventon, fostered a lively, bookish, self-sufficient, and closely knit household. One of eight children, Jane was a devoted daughter and sister, and the adored aunt of innumerable nieces and nephews.
The main body of Jane Austen is a sensitive chapter-by-chapter analysis of her writings, chiefly the completed novels. Over more than a century and a half, various readers have chosen their favourites - Pride and Prejudice being the most widely read and re-read, and Emma generally regarded as her finest, most complex, and subtle work. All the novels deal with the timeless essentials of human nature, and all of them show Jane Austen's superb mastery of dialogue, her own special brand of irony, and her genius for comedy, characterisation, and form.