A Companion to Jane Austen
Chapter One
Jane Austen's Life and Letters
Kathryn Sutherland
Jane Austen's life, as a recoverable narrative, is almost exclusively a matter of family
construction, with authority drawn either from the teller having known her or, more
tenuously, claiming family relationship to her. Such a narrowly deduced documentary
basis for any life is inevitably problematic regardless of how rich the surviving evidence
might be; and in Jane Austen's case the evidence is also scarce. She was surrounded
by family, at every waking and almost every sleeping moment, yet apparently they
saw so little. Family makes, inherits, and transmits what we know as her life; it is
only familial. Refracted through the prism of family, her life is also their lives: her
relationships, variously perceived, to them; and their relationships, variously perceived,
to each other. Through her they live; through them what we imagine as her life is
shaped and circumscribed, even as it is revealed. The trickle of nonfamily biographies,
which ... read full excerpt from A Companion to Jane Austen ebook
