Drawing on unpublished sources, the author offers an intimate, psychological portrait of the novelist, revealing the truth behind many disturbing Austen family secrets and tracing the internal conflicts that formed Austen's divided character."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
It's refreshing to get such a passionate and contrarian account of Jane Austen's life, though the book's emphasis on thwarted emotions and family misdeeds will undoubtedly displease the more traditional-minded of her admirers. David Nokes, a prominent scholar of 18th-century English literature, views Austen as "a wild beast" (her phrase) transformed by well-meaning relatives into a demure spinster through wholesale bowdlerizing of her letters and personal papers. Nokes's narrative doesn't tell us anything new, but by stressing Austen's ambition and acerbity, he offers a welcome alternative perspective.
From Library Journal
As Valerie Grosvenor Myer did in her recent Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart (LJ 5/1/97), Nokes (English, King's Coll., Univ. of London) dispels the benign, sweet, "literary maiden aunt" portrait perpetuated by Austen's relatives. This more frank and open account of her life and family almost reads like one of Austen's novels. Rather than present history as such, Nokes gradually introduces characters and unfolds details and events as they happened or were perceived. Nokes also includes a number of documented quotations of the characters to enhance the more novel-like effect, and he incorporates his own interpretations as if from an omniscient narrator, making the biography interesting and lively. While Myer used much of the same information, Nokes provides more detailed background, regarding, for example, the rejected marriage proposal, the exiled afflicted Austen son, and the aunt accused of thievery. For most literature collections.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting biography with some serious problems,
By
This review is from: Jane Austen: A Life (Hardcover)
I would tell a reader with an intensive interest in Jane Austen not to miss this. Nokes takes a contrarian view of some of the major incidents of JA's life, but his arguments are well supported and anyone with a serious interest in JA should at least ponder them. I wouldn't recommend this as a first-or-only biography of Jane Austen. If the reader is interested in a book of this length, I urge them to try John Halperin's The Life of Jane Austen.
Nokes does a masterful, almost unparalleled job of weaving together quotes from the papers of the Austens and various associates. He assures us that he never puts any words into anyone's mouth. He does, however, freely put thoughts into their heads, some of which are reasonable and some which have no known support. He also draws little verbal pictures to go along with these, reasonable, perhaps, but more suitable for fiction. Nokes also chooses to begin and end his biography with two imaginative "short stories." Interwoven into Chapter One, "Family Secrets" is a surprisingly long account of the Hancock family, Jane's aunt Philadelphia Austen and her husband Tysoe Saul Hancock, separated from his wife and daughter as he tries to rebuild his fortune in India. He ends with an almost entirely imagined account of Francis Cullum, paid caretaker of Thomas Leigh and George Austen. Since we know very little about Cullum or the health problems of Leigh and Austen, I find this highly judgemental piece absurd, especially in a work that purports to be nonfiction. I like that the book has the running title of the chapter on the left-hand page and the dates on the right. The Notes fortunately contain the chapter running title as well as the chapter number, so it is relatively easy to match up notes. The sources, except for manuscripts, are unfortunately scattered throughout the notes - it would be nice if at least major sources were gathered into a bibliography.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What was in those letters that Cassandra burned?,
By
This review is from: Jane Austen: A Life (Hardcover)
This is a good read, well-researched, well thought out and written. Mr. Nokes takes his reader through a fairly wonderful ride about Steventon and its environs. He gives a very clear picture of Jane Austen's family, especially in his interpretations of her relationships with her sister and brothers and cousin Eliza. Notwithstanding his research and his ability to capture and understand Jane Austen and her life, there are some surprising problems which occur later in his book. He does a nice job convincing the reader of Jane Austen's acerbic wit, her double entendres, her hidden messages, her colorful disdain and delights as revealed in her letters. Consequently it is all the more unsettling when Mr. Nokes, three-quarters into his book, does an abrupt about-face and takes a familiar passage from one of her letters at face value. I refer to the passage where she writes of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as being "rather too sparkling...wants to be stretched out...with a long chapter...An Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte". It is beyond anyone's credibility to imagine that the writer of NORTHANGER ABBEY would write these words with any intent but satire and mockery but Mr. Nokes, after having demonstrated how exceptionally mocking and satirical Jane Austen could be, decides to take her at face value and remarks, "suddenly...she felt as if there was nothing that she could not or dared not write". Perhaps he wants to distinguish himself from other biographers by a fresh appraisal of Jane Austen's self regard but I am not convinced that, upon publication of her early works, she suddenly felt a modern sense of stardom. Mr. Nokes seems to imply that SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, early drafts of which were written years before publication, were simply pulled out of her writer's desk, dusted off and updated so that the certain references would seem contemporary. I was fascinated that Mr. Nokes ends this biography by depicting Jane's brother George (essentially banished and forgotten by the Austen parents for being mentally handicapped) as an example of Jane's ultimate selfishness and callous nature. I doubt that enough is known of the circumstances for this conclusion to be just.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Quite,
By A Customer
This review is from: Jane Austen: A Life (Paperback)
In her 1928 essay, "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf laments as "deplorable" the absence of a history of British women prior to the eighteenth century. "...at what age," Woolf writes, "should she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like?...after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen."What, though, was Jane Austen's life really like? What was Jane Austen really like? The 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have seen a veritable flowering of Austen biographies and studies (Marilyn Butler, Roger Sales, Jan Fergus, Tony Tanner, Claudia Johnson) that would no doubt have impressed even Virginia Woolf, by sheer number alone, if by nothing else. David Nokes's biography, Jane Austen: A Life differs from many of the others in its presentation of Austen, not as a staid moralist or a stoic spinster, but as a member of a manipulative and conniving family. To this end, Nokes focuses on the correspondence, not of Jane per se, but rather on that of the extended Austen family and especially Jane's cousin, Eliza de la Feuillide. The book, especially the first half, could just have easily been called Eliza de la Feuillide: The Fascinating Life of Jane Austen's Cousin. This extension is justified in that it does answer many questions about Austen's more adventurous and worldly siblings, relatives and friends. For example, Eliza Hancock de la Feuillide Austen was no doubt the natural daughter of a colonial administrator in India by the name of Warren Hastings. In her early twenties Eliza married a French nobleman, who sadly, was sent to the guillotine only a few years later. Eliza, herself, escaped France with her young son and lived as a glamorous demimodaine "Countess" in Regency London, her life only becoming staid and prosaic after her marriage to the much younger Henry Austen, Jane's older brother and Eliza's own first cousin. Nokes's "novelizes" this biography by paraphrasing the Austen family letters. It is an approach that does not always work, at times sounding quite artificial and contrived. In the book's opening sentences, for example, Nokes's writes: "Bengal, 1773: It is the rainy season in the Sunderbunds. Inside his lonely makeshift hut the Surgeon-Extraordinary sits writing a letter home to his wife in England. The livid orange sun is sinking over this dismal region of fetid salt-flats, swamp and jungle...It is three years since he last saw his wife, and he knows now that he will never see her again. Toil and disease have wasted his body and depressed his spirits." Much later, in recounting a scene between Jane Austen and her brother Frank, Nokes's writes: "The St. Helena islanders, said Frank, charged so much to passing ships for even the simplest supplies that a couple of acres of potatoes or a garden of cabbages there would provide a decent dowry for an daughter. Jane looked down into their beautiful Castle Square garden and thought of Edward Bridges. Would syringas do instead, she wondered?" Fortunately, Nokes's does focus on the important figures of Eliza, Henry and Cassandra Austen in Jane Austen's life and the role they played in shaping her unique Regency voice. Unfortunately, the "novelizing" of the Austen family letters grows extremely tiresome and quickly becomes a detriment to the overall quality of this book. There are a lot of Jane Austen biographies out there. Although it does have its redeeming qualities, this one was simply not my favorite.
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