Volume 45, Number 2 · February 5, 1998
Not 'Everybody's Dear Jane'
By Hilary Mantel
Jane Austen: A Life
by Claire Tomalin
Knopf, 341 pp., $27.50
Jane Austen: A Life
by David Nokes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 578 pp., $35.00
At the beginning of Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen there is a pretty sketch map of Hampshire, showing the contours of the fields and woodland, and the great houses within reach of Steventon Rectory, where Jane grew up. There is Oakley Hall and Hackwood Park, Freefolk Priors, Laverstoke House, The Vyne. The imaginative reader cannot help looking into this map, rather than looking at it, visualizing in three dimensions its impeccable greenness, order, propriety. As Jane Austen wrote, of a prospect she describes in Emma, 'It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being oppressive.'
Review, 4872 words
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