A review by ianbanks
Jane Austen: Her Life by Park Honan

5.0

An exhaustive, but never exhausting, bio of the beloved author. Mr Hoban goes into an astonishing amount of detail on Ms Austen’s life but it never feels extraneous or irrelevant: even the lengthy passages on her brother Frank’s naval career feel important simply because he was an outstanding and important figure in his own right as well as having experiences that informed details and characters in Austen’s novels. I hesitate to call it definitive simply because my own knowledge of the era and field is so limited but this is one of the best literary biographies I’ve ever read.