Contemporary Biographers of Nineteenth-Century Novelists

O F THE FIVE BIOGRAPHIES under scrutiny here, at least two have attempted to break with traditional biographical procedures. By traditional, I mean linear or chronological development, some elementary discussion of each work, an effort to detail all aspects of the life, the evasion of psychological elements that seem to defy explanation. Of the other three biographies, David Nokes’s Jane Austen: A Life purports to be more innovative than his study really is. He pursues Austen relentlessly as satirical and rebellious — picking up on her remark in one of her letters, “I am a wild beast.” But Nokes’s probe of her rebelliousness is not so new as he makes us believe it is, although he does edge Jane out of the “maiden aunt” posture. More on Nokes later, when he will be paired with Claire Tomalin’s very different Jane Austen: A Biography. Whatever else, both books indicate that Austen biography, despite the recent “definitive” study by Park Honan (1987), is still quite alive. Still, a corollary question remains whether we need two more Austen biographies when the material has already been so thoroughly defined

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