Becoming Jane Austen

Jane Austen was a very great novelist and one of the central figures of English literature, but she herself lived a quiet and uneventful life, mostly in the two Hampshire villages of Steventon and Chawton. Jon Spence’s new biography focuses its attention away from the wider literary and intellectual currents that informed her writing and instead concentrates on the immediate influences on her life and work. “Becoming Jane Austen” shows how Jane Austen’s own personal experiences resonated throughout her work, from her juvenilia to Sanditon. Two people, above all, affected her life and caught her imagination. The first was her flirtatious and exotic cousin, Elisa de Feuillade, married to a French count who was later guillotined. The second was the young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy, with whom Jane fell in love and whom she hoped to marry. Jon Spence traces the deep emotional impact that her encounters with Eliza and Tom had on her and shows how she worked this out in her life and in her work, including in her major novels.