John Halperin Book order

Featuring a new preface by the author, this paperback edition of John Halperin's acclaimed and controversial biography moves beyond the usually vague account of Austen's life and away from the serene and untroubled image of Austen created by a protective family. In The Life ofJane Austen, Halperin reveals a robust, vigorous, and at times difficult woman with a large and diverse circle of family and acquaintances. He documents her troubled relationship with a hypochondriacal mother and her frank dislike of the sister-in-law who usurped her childhood home, sheds new light on the shadowy existence of a retarded older brother, and sets forth in greater detail than ever before the number and nature of Austen's relations to her suitors, the romantic passages of her life, and her attitude about childbearing. Making fuller use of Austen's correspondence than previous biographers, Halperin shows us the costs exacted on a sensitive and critical personality by a society--and, frequently, a family--that paid too little attention to the predicament of unmarried women, especially those with inadequate financial means.

This book was first published in 1975, the bicentenary of Jane Austen's birth. Though she has long been recognized as one of the major English novelists her reputation was established relatively late and has withstood periods of neglect and controversy. The present volume brings together nineteen essays that marked the bicentenary and in doing so reflected the critical attitudes which some of the twentieth century's most influential scholars have entertained towards the novelist. These essays range from nineteenth-century reactions to the novels and to the novelist herself, through twentieth-century criticism of the individual novels, to considerations of the novelist's reputation abroad. This book will be of interest both to scholars and students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and also to the general reader of Jane Austen's novels.