Austen scholars argue over entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The update to the Oxford University Dictionary of National Biography has several entries that are being disputed by scholars of those subjects, including Jane Austen.
Similar errors have infuriated Jane Austen scholars. ‘There are some 70 factual errors, wrong names, wrong dates, wrong family relationships, wrong dating of events, as well as omissions of useful information,’ according to the distinguished Austen specialist and author Deidre Le Faye. ‘The longer this entry remains uncorrected, the more readers will be misled by it.’
We had the opportunity to peruse the Jane Austen entry, and it seems to us that the main problem is a postmodernist biographical approach–not a strictly fact-based approach. Speculation is presented as fact, as is usual in standalone biographies, which are necessarily colored by the author’s pet theories (and there’s nothing wrong with that). We are told that is intentional in this case, but we are disappointed that such an entry is included in a general-usage publication such as the DNB.
