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    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

    Written by Paula Byrne

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9780062263360
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Author

    Paula Byrne

    Paula Byrne is the author the bestselling biographies ‘Perdita’, ‘Mad World’, ‘The Real Jane Austen’, ‘Belle’, ‘Kick’ and ‘The Genius of Jane Austen’. She is founder and chief executive of ReLit, the Bibliotherapy Foundation, a charity devoted to the mental health benefits of reading. She is married to Sir Jonathan Bate and lives in Oxford.

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    Reviews for The Real Jane Austen

    4.5/5

    19 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I have now listen to it three times. That’s how good it is.
    • 5/5
      An excellent non-traditional biography filled with fascinating background detail and context to Jane Austen's life and work. It was thrilling to learn so much in this one book that was new to me about Austen and her extended circle. This is a real a tribute to Paula Byrne, as I've been a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America for years, read several previous biographies as well as the six novels (repeatedly), and attended Austen conferences. But now I'm seeing Austen's work in a new light thanks to Paula Byrne's creative approach. Highly recommended to all, whether you've read Jane Austen before or not.
    • 5/5
      Such a good book. I found myself dragging my feet on the last chapter and epilogue because I didn't want to be finished. Wonderful, clever concept to use significant artifacts to move the biography along and to more clearly illuminate Austen's life and works. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and recommend it highly!
    • 4/5
      I haven't read Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen biography, but I have read others, like Jane's Fame. The Real Jane Austen is the best I've read so far. Like Shakespeare, there seem to be limited resources for insights into Austen's life, but Paula Byrne has taken the clever approach of looking at Austen's life and books via 18 objects connected to her, e.g. a family profile done silhouette-style, a shawl from India, a cocked hat, a laptop (i.e. a small portable desk), and a bathing machine.She rebuts the idea that Austen had a sequestered country life, showing how well-traveled she was. She rebuts the idea that she was a lonely spinster, showing her active social life and the several men that were attracted to her. She rebuts the idea that she was isolated from the world of business, showing her fighting determination with publishers and rare ability for a woman writer at that time to make money from her books.Unexpected topics come up, like homosexuality in the Navy, and race relations. One theme I hadn't thought about, and found quite striking, is: "marriage meant childbirth which quite often meant death." Apparently because of medical ignorance, an excruciatingly large percentage of mothers died in childbirth during her lifetime. The risk taken for love, or financial security, had life and death implications.The material relating to getting her books published is fascinating, including the infamous purchase of rights in what became Northanger Abbey by a publisher who didn't publish it for 13 years and then sold the rights back to Austen's brother. I also enjoyed the author's information and angles on Austen's writings. This includes some of the lesser-known Austen creations, like the hilarious and woefully under-read Lady Susan: "She is Jane Austen's most unscrupulous, even sadistic, female character", with a hypnotic effect on men. The main attraction is her mind; as she says, "If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence." For her, there's nothing better than conquering the reluctant male: "There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike, acknowledge one's superiority." As Byrne says, "Lady Vernon is charming, clever, beautiful, vicious, witty and morally corrupt." Ingredients for a great read.This is a solid four stars, and probably deserves even better.
    • 5/5
      Wow! The sassy and surprising self confidence of Jane Austen is matched by the confidence and writing skills of a biographer. What a wonderful read.This is probably not best described as a biography of Austen, but Paula Byrne does the equivalent of a biography by knitting together aspects of Austen's life, basing each episode on some tangible item - Austen's teenage journal; a painting of bathing machines and so on.The end result is a detailed image of Austen that turned my views upside down. Far from the mousey small town reclusive vicars daughter of my understanding - Austen come across as smart, opinionated, assured, travelled and confident. The bursting into the world of Pride and Prejudice is less surprising as a result.Thank you Paula Byrne.Read Feb 2016
    • 5/5
      This is an interesting book for fans of Jane Austen. It should not be the first biography that one reads, since it does not move through her life in a conventional manner and expects a certain amount of knowledge about her life. Instead, it enriches one's understanding of her life by focussing on an item that she would have been familiar with, and enlarges upon its associations with her life. I thought that it was very interesting and gave me a much better feel for Jane Austen as a person. The problem with biographies of famous people is that there is so much material that the book focusses entirely on their public life and accomplishments, and I am very grateful to Byrne for this different approach.For a basic biography, I would recommend Carol Shield's Jane Austen : a life, which is a reliable 120 page account of her life, although it lacks a bibliography. My current favorite among long biographies is John Halperin's The Life of Jane AustenThere are a variety of "specialized" books that focus on Jane Austen life such as Nigel Nicolson and Stephen Colover's The World of Jane Austen: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction which focuses on houses and places she lived in or visited; Audrey Hawkridge's Jane and Her Gentlemen: Jane Austen and the Men in Her Life and Novels which people who enjoy this book would probably also like.
    • 4/5
      Paula Byrne takes several items belonging to Jane Austen or of her era and talks about how they were an influence or a inspiration on her. How they reflect her life and the kind of person she was, there's colour illustrations of the sketches that are the theme of the book and now, dammit, I have to find my writing slope, get it recovered and use the damned thing.
    • 4/5
      I have never really been a big Austen fan, which along with my relative indifference to Shakespeare and Chaucer when I began my first degree reaaaally made other lit students look at me askance. I still think that those three are pushed upon us to a ridiculous degree, and often its not even their best work that is touted as The Book To Read (for example, I favour Troilus and Criseyde over The Canterbury Tales, and pretty much anything over Romeo and Juliet). But anyway, I've slowly come to appreciate them a little bit more, which will probably horrify my mother (at least where Austen is concerned). Sorry, Mum.Paula Byrne's biography of Jane Austen is quite a common sense one. Instead of looking first to her fiction and then trying to extrapolate out to her life, it looks at the objects that surrounded her or inspired her and teases out things from there. I'm not really a scholar of the period in any sense, so I can't speak as to the accuracy of it, but it reads well and I appreciated this view of Jane Austen as a practical, witty and determined woman, fully supported by her family and with no doubts about her chosen course in life. It debunks ideas like the picture some people have of her being very sheltered and not in contact with the world, putting us in touch with the politics she would have been aware of and the places she went. It has some nice inserts with some of the objects mentioned pictured in colour.I'm not keeping this book, but I'm certainly donating it to my library -- I know that someone who is more of an Austen fan than me will doubtless appreciate it even more, and I'm willing to bet there's a member of even our tiny little library who fits the bill.
    • 4/5
      Referencing letters, notes and objects she cherished in her personal life, the author provides an interesting biography of Jane Austen. Within lie many links between the characters in the books she wrote and characters she grew up with or met along her life's journey. Through stories told to her by her seafaring and clergyman brothers as well as a favorite rather wild aunt who had lived in France, in addition to their letters and gifts, Jane Austen broadened and enriched the lives of her characters beyond what she herself may have personally experienced.
    • 4/5
      I hesitated for a while before buying this book as I feared yet another Janelite effort like the seemingly thousands spawned in the lake from which Colin Firth emerges in Andrew Davies' adaptation of P&P. I'm glad that I did get it because it is an excellent, oblique look at Austen - as the subtitle says: A Life in Small Things'. Byrne has married her close textual reading to an in-depth knowledge of the social history of the period and what is known of Austen and her family, and the result is an infinitely enriching, informative book with carefully selected illustrations. I particularly enjoyed the second chapter, The East Indian Shawl, with its brave unmarried girls setting out for the unknown in the hope of securing their futures. Well written and thoroughly enjoyable.