Essay about Jane Austen biographies included in new book
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!
