Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
The Ideal Woman
By Robert M. Adams
Jane Austen: Her Life
by Park Honan
St. Martin's, 452 pp., $24.95
As a practicing novelist, Jane Austen achieved recognition only late in her short life. Her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, though composed in epistolary form under the title Elinor and Marianne as early as 1795–1796, was not actually published until 1811, when its author was thirty-six years old and had only six more years to live. Yet when she made her debut in print, Miss Austen was hardly a novice; she had been writing jokes, parodies, and burlesques since the age of thirteen or thereabouts; more recently she had written stories for her sister, her brothers (when they happened to be on hand), and for visiting members of her extended family—nieces, cousins, sisters-in-law. Her public success was therefore in the nature of a family triumph; her kinfolk far and near rejoiced in it, and several of the young people, impressed with the idea that it must be easy to write an entertaining, popular novel (the unspoken undertone was 'if even Aunt Jane can do it'), brought budding manuscripts of their own for her comment and encouragement.
Review, 3215 words
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