A review by kmthomas06
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne

4.0

I really enjoyed this biography of Austen as told through different objects, either that she owned or made use of, in her daily life. Biographies about Jane are often hard to tell apart for me; her story after all is not going to change unless we stumble across a cache of lost letters (if only!) so I liked this idea of caring less about the timeline of her life and more about the objects that would have been paramount to it such as her writing desk, the topaz cross from her sailor brother, the check from her publisher Murray and what those objects represented to her and her work over the course of her life and career. I did think the drawings a bit odd to go with each chapter when the real things are then provided as photographs later (why not just use the photographs in the first place?) but that is a severely minor quibble to what was one of the more interesting Austen biographies I've read.