Jane Austen A Brief Life Author:Fiona Stafford Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever... more » since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz?
In this graceful introduction to the author?s life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen?s six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron ? full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.« less