The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
Paula Byrne, 2013
HarperCollins
380 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061999093
Summary
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things offers a startlingly original look at the revered writer through a variety of key moments, scenes, and objects in her life and work.
Going beyond previous traditional biographies which have traced Austen’s daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester, Paula Byrne’s portrait—organized thematically and drawn from the most up-to-date scholarship and unexplored sources—explores the lives of Austen’s extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Through their absorbing stories, we view Austen on a much wider stage and discover unexpected aspects of her life and character.
Byrne transports us to different worlds—the East Indies and revolutionary Paris—and different events—from a high society scandal to a petty case of shoplifting, She follows Austen on her extensive travels, setting her in contexts both global and English, urban and rural, political and historical, social and domestic—wider perspectives of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.
Literary scholarship has revealed that letters and tokens in Austen’s novel’s often signal key turning points in the unfolding narrative. This groundbreaking biography explores Jane's own story following the same principle. As Byrne reveals, small things in the writer's world—a scrap of paper, a simple gold chain, an ivory miniature, a bathing machine—hold significance in her emotional and artistic development.
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things introduces us to a woman deeply immersed in the world around her, yet far ahead of her time in her independence and ambition; to an author who was an astute commentator on human nature and the foibles of her own age. Rich and compelling, it is a fresh, insightful, and often surprising portrait of an artist and a vivid evocation of the complex world that shaped her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Birkenhead, England, UK
• Education— PhD., University of Liverpool
• Currently—lives in Oxford, England
Paula Byrne is a British author and biographer who wrote Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (2005) and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009). Her debut book was the study of Jane Austen, Jane Austen and the Theatre, which was published in 2002 by Hambledon and later reissued by Bloomsbury. Byrne has a Ph. D. from University of Liverpool.
In 2005 her biography Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson was featured on the Richard & Judy Book Club on Channel 4, propelling it into the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Her book Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead was published by HarperPress in the UK in August 2009 and HarperCollins New York in the USA in April 2010. An excerpt was published in the Sunday Times of August 9 under the headline Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited. . An illustrated extract appeared in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in advance of American publication.
In a television programme broadcast on BBC2 on Boxing Day 2011 she explored the possibility that a Regency pen and ink drawing of graphite on vellum, labelled on the verso 'Miss Jane Austin', might be an authentic portrait of Jane Austen. The film presented forensic and art historical evidence that the work was authentic to the period, not a forgery, but the case for its being Austen was fiercely debated, both in the programme and subsequently in the Times Literary Supplement. Byrne lent the drawing to Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, where it was exhibited from summer 2012.
In January 2013, coinciding with the bicentenary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice, Byrne published a new biography called The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Featured as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, it approaches the subject's life by means of an array of key objects, including her portable writing desk and the topaz cross given to her by her brother.
Byrne is married to Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/10/14.)
Book Reviews
Vividly persuasive…. The Real Jane Austen is excellent… particularly on the dissonant topics of theater and slavery….Byrnes section on slavery is better still, establishing links between Austen’s protagonists and contemporary figures, her pointed references and contemporary events, which highlight her supposedly oblivious fiction’s sharp views on the slave trade.
New York Times Book Review
Byrne takes Austen seriously as a writer...[she] brings to life a woman of “wonderful exuberance and self-confidence,” of “firm opinions and strong passions.” Little wonder that every other man she meets seems to fall in love with her.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post
Magnificent…explodes the old view of Jane Austen. Byrne’s research is wide, deep and meticulous…a more vivid and memorable Jane Austen emerges than a relentlessly "straight" old-fashioned narrative could deliver.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
[Byrne] breathes yet more life into Austen and her works by considering the objects that populated her days…. [The] thematic approach offers a revealing picture of Austen and a lively social history….paints a fresh and vivid picture of an inimitable woman.
Economist
Biographer Paula Byrne has taken objects from Jane Austen’s real life and times and used them as if we were dropping in on Austen on any given day...a dynamic new biography in which Austen lives and breathes.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
A vivacious new portrait.... [E]ach chapter unfolds from the biographer's description of a small object associated with Austen's life.... Byrne's Austen, as revealed through this archive of objects, emerges as a worldly woman, profoundly enmeshed in a wider world than she's often acknowledged to occupy.
Publishers Weekly
Byrne begins each essay in this collection with an image and description of an object of particular importance to Austen...[and] how these items influenced her life and informed her work. This premise is stretched thin at some points...but it is an engaging narrative technique.... Austen intentionally drew inspiration from life in order to add what was at that time an innovative realism and verisimilitude to her novels. —Megan Hodge, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., Richmond
Library Journal
For Austen obsessives, this latest study offers a few flashes of revelation amid long stretches of minutiae.... Ultimately, all of this accumulation of detail doesn't bring readers much closer to a woman the author admits was "a very private person" and "the most elusive of all writers with the exception of Shakespeare."
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Real Jane Austen:
1. Paula Byrne's use of material objects to limn Jane Austen's life is considered an innovative approach to biographical writing. Does it work? Did the book engage you? Is her discussion of the various objects and their influcence in Austen's writings persuasive?
2. What conventional views of Jane Austen does Byrne reject in writing her biography. How does her portrayal of Austen differ from, say, her brother's?
3. How much did you know about Austen's life before you read Byrne's book? What new insights have you gained into the author...and, most especially, into her novels? Is there anything that surprises you as a result of Byrne's biography?
4. After reading The Real Jane Austen, how would you define Austen?
5. Talk about Austen's attitudes toward marriage and children. What were her views on slavery?
6. Which essays, detailing which objects in particular—e.g., the East Indian shawl, ivory miniature, or velvet cushions—do you find most enlightening and or persuasive?
7. Do you find any parts of Byrne's book stretched a bit thin...or lacking in persuasiveness...or bogged down in minutiae?
8. Which is your favorite Austen novel (if you have a "favorite")? What insights have you gained into that work after reading Paula Byrne's biography?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)