A Portrait of Jane Austen Book

The late eighteenth-century world in which Jane Austen lived was one that combined good sense, elegant manners, intelligence and piety with a liberal dash of spirited fun. Small wonder that she felt so at home in it.

Drawing on Jane Austen's letters, novels and other people's memories of her, Lord David Cecil sets out 'to reconstruct and depict her living personality and to explore its relation to her art'. The portrait that emerges is of a clear-sighted, observant, strong-minded woman whose witty and ironic representation of her own society has delighted readers for centuries.

More than a literary biography, however, David Cecil's book, with its insights into family life, beliefs, standards, customs and conventions, tastes and fashions, is also a valuable contribution to social history.

"A masterpiece which ought to be in every . . . home. Nobody could have done it better." Auberon Waugh