Volume 32, Number 8 · May 9, 1985
Double Life
By John Bayley
The Life of Jane Austen
by John Halperin
Johns Hopkins University Press, 399 pp., $25.00
A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family
by George Holbert Tucker
Carcanet New Press, 238 pp., $18.50
In one of Barbara Pym's novels a young man has occasion to find himself marveling 'at the sharpness of even the nicest women.' The sharpest are also the nicest. Even the nicest are sharp. The comment is loaded with cunning and we can take it either way. Jane Austen would have endorsed it instantly, and with amusement. She would have been amused, too, by the way her critics tend to divide into those who emphasize how sharp she was, and those who loyally proclaim how nice she was. No doubt she was both, and in the highest degree, in her art as in her life, 'biting of tongue but tender of heart,' as Virginia Woolf put it.
Review, 2777 words
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