Jane Austen: A Life

Linda Simon

Nokes does a splendid job of evoking 18th-century England and the often eccentric figures who populated Austen's world. —Newsday

Claude Rawson

[Austen's letters] are wonderfully revealing, especially strong on the texture of relationships and the tang of social encounters.
— The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Nokes (Jonathan Swift) claims originality for his new Austen exploration that it is "a biography written forwards," with "each moment" presented "as it was experienced at the time, not with the detached knowingness of hindsight." But, he concedes, "in the disposition of a character's thoughts. . . .there is some degree of invention." Austen's abbreviated life, aside from teenage attempts at mocking, in manuscript, the lives she observed, was "a constant succession of small events" until she managed to find publishers to chance her writings, first produced for private amusement. By the time Sense and Sensibility emerged in print in 1811, its author was in her late 30s. In 1817, three published novels later, she died, very likely of Addison's disease, an attribution that Nokes buries in the 54th of 81 endnotes in the chapter concerning her death. The author argues with earlier biographers over minor points, describing at length events in Austen's extended family and elaborating on her taste in bonnets and muslins, sponge cakes and dry toast. Such virtuous frugalities overlaid an imaginative life in which the novelist satirically subverted her society. Nokes adds little new beyond his own imagination, which includes entering the minds of his characters and ascribing chicken pox to a decline in health caused by emotional distress.

Library Journal

Nokes (English, King's College, University of London) dispels the benign, sweet, "literary maiden aunt" portrait perpetuated by Austen's relatives. This more frank and open account of her life and family almost reads like one of Austen's novels. Rather than present history as such, Nokes gradually introduces characters and unfolds details and events as they happened or were perceived. Nokes also includes a number of documented quotations of the characters to enhance the more novel-like effect, and he incorporates his own interpretations as if from an omniscient narrator, making the biography interesting and lively. While Myer used much of the same information, Nokes provides more detailed background, regarding, for example, the rejected marriage proposal, the exiled afflicted Austen son, and the aunt accused of thievery. -- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Library Journal

Nokes (English, King's College, University of London) dispels the benign, sweet, "literary maiden aunt" portrait perpetuated by Austen's relatives. This more frank and open account of her life and family almost reads like one of Austen's novels. Rather than present history as such, Nokes gradually introduces characters and unfolds details and events as they happened or were perceived. Nokes also includes a number of documented quotations of the characters to enhance the more novel-like effect, and he incorporates his own interpretations as if from an omniscient narrator, making the biography interesting and lively. While Myer used much of the same information, Nokes provides more detailed background, regarding, for example, the rejected marriage proposal, the exiled afflicted Austen son, and the aunt accused of thievery. -- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Washington Post Book World

What a feast for Austen addicts!

Christian Science Monitor

In Nokes' hands, Austen has become, in effect, one of the romantic heroines she delighted in crafting. It is a sensitive interpretation, overlaid with the confidence of one who feels that he has seized his subject's soul. Austen's verbal brilliance rings through Nokes's prose.

Kirkus Reviews

While this much-needed revisionist biography sheds new light on the great novelist, it too often obscures the facts of her life behind speculation about what she and her intimates might have thought or felt. Just before her early death in 1817 at age 41, Jane Austen wrote to a niece, "Pictures of Perfection make me sick & wicked." It is ironic, then, that the novelist's family and subsequent biographers should have endeavored to conceal her (and her family's) blemishes. Displaying an impressive command of the Austen archives, Nokes (English Literature/Univ. of London) in contrast highlights various Austen family scandals and exposes how Austen's own mercurial character, for all its virtues, had its vicious side. He shows one of Austen's cousins to have quite likely been the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, the controversial governor of British India; he also attends closely to an aunt's humiliating brush with the law. Nokes eschews anachronistic labels: He portrays Austen not as a modern genius awaiting recognition, but as the sometimes romantic, sometimes caustic wit her family knew. Over and beyond his recognition of how family scandal helped inspire Austen's romantic imagination and solidify her moral sense, Nokes contributes to Austen studies with a series of local observations: He questions, for example, the conventional wisdom that Austen found her sojourn in Bath traumatic. His desire to recreate the world and the writer known to Austen's intimates, however, leads Nokes to indulge overmuch in florid, novelistic renderings of the Austens' various points of view. It would be hard to blame general readers for preferring Valerie Grosvenor Myer's straightforward andaccessible sketch of Austen from earlier this year. Nokes's portrait of a less-than-perfect Austen, then, while it offers new insights and a wealth of detail, employs too much imagination and takes too narrow a perspective to finally satisfy.