Read in February 2014
Becoming Jane Austen, by Jon Spence
Four stars
For serious fans of Miss Jane, Jon Spence’s biography is definitely a must-read. He takes a hard and thorough look at the people in her life, both contemporaries and ancestors, to find the inspiration for the themes and characters in her novels. While his best-known discovery concerns her relationship with Tom Lefroy, from which Hollywood — taking great liberties — spun out the film Becoming Jane, Spence finds precursors for just about every character and real-life examples of every theme in Austen’s circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. Some of his insights are marvelously novel, including his contention that Austen gave her own personality to Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lefroy’s personality to Lizzie Bennett. And his suggestion that near the end of her life Austen’s attention turned to adverse effects of women’s ceaseless childbearing leaves readers with yet another reason to regret the works left unwritten by her early death.
Jane Austen, by Carol Shields
Three stars
This brief biography offers an quick overview of Austen’s life and Shield’s interpretation that she and her heroines were searching for a home, something available only to married women of the day. Whether or not Shields is correct, for me her biography underscored the wretchedness of the lives of unmarried genteel women in those days, forever subject to the dictates of parents or brothers of where and how they would live. The book made me very sad for Miss Jane. With her lively intelligence and artistic ambition, the constraints of her lot in life must have been very difficult to bear as her decade-long silence when she was living in Bath clearly demonstrates.