Hermione Lee, best known as a biographer of Virginia Woolf, has published Body Parts, a collection of essays, including one about biographies of Jane Austen.

We know so little about Austen that biographers have been relatively free to invent her. Sweet or sour, a gentle homebody or a bitter satirist covertly resenting her circumscribed life: you can knit your own Jane Austen as a tea cosy or paint her grim and dark. These are the extremes between which Lee mediates. In a brisk, amusing discussion she sums up with robust common sense. The biographer must live with uncertainty but has a duty to the facts, among which, of course, Austen’s novels come first.

Ain’t that the truth!

Zoë Heller’s foreward to a new edition of Jane Austen’s Lesley Castle has been printed in the Guardian. Ms. Heller relates the silly humor of these lighthearted stories to the more sophisticated humor of the adult novelist.

Charlotte, with her culinary monomania - her insistence on the loss of victuals being of greater import than the loss of a fiancé - is quite surreal in her dottiness. Twenty-five years later, Austen would take Charlotte’s eccentricity and loquaciousness and innocence, and transmute these qualities into the comic pathos of Miss Bates; here, she is content to give us a kind of pantomime spinster.

Alert AustenBlog Reader Deb R. sent us a link to an article in USA Today about Julian Fellowes’ new novel, Snobs. Mr. Fellowes, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of GOSFORD PARK (starring half the cast of P&P3 AND E2’s Mr. Knightley–there’s a Jane connection for you), has written a comedy of manners about life amongst the upper classes, and the comparisons to Jane are probably obvious.

Some authors range all over the pages, filling them with big themes. Think of Russell Banks’ brilliant The Darling, roaring across two continents, exploring genocide in Liberia and social turmoil in the USA.

Then there is the miniaturist, the writer who captures the social nuance, the smallest slight, the subtle triumph achieved within a small society. Jane Austen remains the platinum standard. Her genius was for capturing the social minuet, not the titanic struggle between England and France.

Sounds like a good one. Thanks for the link, Deb!

Now that the film’s hit a few more cities, there are more reviews to go with it. (more…)