
Jane Aiken Hodge has written a charming biography of one of the most popular English writers. This was not the case in her own time though. Apart from Pride and Prejudice, which was the most popular, the others did not do that well. She wrote the first books several years before they were actually published. The first book she wrote, which her father managed to sell to a publisher, was Susan. It was never published and years later, her brother Henry bought it back from the publisher. Jane Austen rewrote it and it was finally published posthumously as Northanger Abbey.
I recently read two other books connected to Jane Austen; Jane Austen and Food (review) and Jane Austen and Names (review) by Maggie Lane. Maggie Lane compared food and names in Jane Austen’s books with culture and tradition at the time and how it might have been in her own life. The conclusion was that Jane Austen knew very well what she was talking about when she described food, meals and tradition because she based it on her own experience. This comes to mind now, when I read this biography. Jane Aiken Hodge follows the letters chronologically and pair it with glimpses from Jane Austen’s life. Her letters tell us that she was a very witty, sharp and humorous person. Her letters follow the style she uses in her books. It is easy to mistake quotations from her letters for something from one of her books. Her real life and the life of her books are woven into each other. Just like the food described in the books are typical for the time, and the names she gives her characters are often found in her own family, it seems that she has taken a lot of inspiration from her own life. Jane Aiken Hodge shows us places, excursions and trips that Jane Austen went to/on and how similar outings ended up in her books.