Synopses & Reviews
In this new biography of Jane Austen, David Nokes plays master sleuth and storyteller in presenting the great novelist "not in the modest pose which her family determined for her, but rather, as she most frequently presented herself, as rebellious, satirical, and wild."
Review
"This handsome volume contains a biography written like a novel—a happy idea (as Austen might have put it) which allows the author to include all kinds of interesting details, such as facts about money, clothes, and houses, of which his subject surely would have approved. She might not have approved of Nokes' revelation that one of her brothers (apparently autistic) was sent away at the age of six and never seen or mentioned by the family afterward, but this is an interesting discord for the modern reader to ponder. Writing a novelistic biography also allows the biographer to speak, as it were, from the interior of his subjects, and here is where his approach is less successful. We see Nokes trying a little too strenuously to make his claim that Austen was rebellious and even radical by nature. Like a novelist, he uses the voices of his 'characters' to make his own argument. Unlike his subject, he often makes his own voice too evident among them." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
About the Author
David Nokes is a Reader in English Literature at King's College, London. He is the author of John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (1995), and Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985).