Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Unavailable
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Unavailable
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

    Written by Paula Byrne

    Narrated by Louise Hulland

    5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Since her death , people have got Jane Austen wrong. The real Jane – revealed for the first time in this landmark biography – was a less cosy, more spiky, more modern figure than she is usually imagined to be. Far from retelling a familiar story, Byrne’s book uses new research and new techniques to give us Jane Austen for the 21st century.

    Paula Byrne – an internationally renowned Jane Austen scholar and a best-selling biographer – has uncovered a very different Jane Austen to the Jane of popular imagination.

    This Jane is a woman deeply immersed in the culture around her, but also far ahead of her time in her independence and tough-mindedness.. Throughout, this audio-book gives the sense of Austen as an astute commentator on human nature in general and her own age in particular, and above all as a writer of independence and ambition.

    Each chapter is focussed on a key moment in Austen’s life: eg. when her handicapped brother is removed from the family, when her exotic cousin Eliza arrives in the family circle, when her aunt was arrested for shoplifting, her time alone in London. The book also gives detailed attention to the novels themselves.

    After this book, no longer can Austen be viewed as someone who did not engage with the great political events of her time. How many lovers of her work are aware that the Prince Regent kept a debauched household down the road from her village, that she was related by marriage to other major literary figures of the time such as the libertine Gothic novelist William Beckford and her favourite poet George Crabbe. The book will also identify her long lost seaside love as well as argue that her assumed ‘genteel’ sense of humour could also be savage, highly subversive irony.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJan 17, 2013
    ISBN9780007468188
    Unavailable
    The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
    Author

    Paula Byrne

    Paula Byrne is the author the bestselling biographies ‘Perdita’, ‘Mad World’, ‘The Real Jane Austen’, ‘Belle’, ‘Kick’ and ‘The Genius of Jane Austen’. She is founder and chief executive of ReLit, the Bibliotherapy Foundation, a charity devoted to the mental health benefits of reading. She is married to Sir Jonathan Bate and lives in Oxford.

    More audiobooks from Paula Byrne

    Related to The Real Jane Austen

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      HOW I WRITE Lucinda Riley

      Jun 17, 2019

      Irish-born Lucinda Riley is the bestselling author of over 20 novels. Her Seven Sisters series has topped the charts the world over, and has been optioned for a TV show. I have to write my first draft in total solitude. As we have four kids and our

      1 min read

    • Article

      Plain But Sensual

      Feb 14, 2021

      Plain But Sensual
      2 min read

    • Article

      Persuasion

      Jul 27, 2022

      Persuasion
      3 min read

    • Article

      Time Out

      May 31, 2019

      Now, if there was ever a book that deserved the label of “weighty tome” it’s this one. More than 500 pages of recollections from moderately famous explorer John Rae. Probably best remembered for delivering the news that fellow explorer Sir John Frank

      5 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jul 13, 2022

      Great Read
      7 min read

    • Article

      Jane Austen Trivia

      Mar 26, 2020

      Who knew that Jane brewed her own beer? In a letter to her sister Cassandra in January 1800, Jane told her, “We are brewing spruce beer again.” During this period, brewing was a traditional chore for women because water was often contaminated and it

      5 min read

    • Article

      Jane Austen’s Hampshire

      Jan 31, 2020

      Jane Austen’s Hampshire
      5 min read

    • Article

      THE Reading room

      Dec 2, 2020

      Trent Dalton’s ambitious tale combines a dreamy aura of magical realism with scenes rooted in the Australian landscape. At its heart is Molly Hook, the “poor little gravedigger girl”, age seven when the story opens in Darwin in 1935. Molly’s mum, Vio

      6 min read

    • Article

      Cosplaying Jane Austen

      Jul 22, 2017

      Cosplaying Jane Austen
      7 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jun 16, 2021

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Jan 26, 2022

      AFTER reading about swans in your Christmas double issue (‘Ride a white swan’, December 15/22, 2021), I checked my Franklin Mint bisque royal swan by R. V. Ruyckevelt, which dwells in our bathroom, and found that its beak was correct. It was interest

      2 min read

    • Article

      What’s So Great About Jane?

      Mar 26, 2020

      What’s So Great About Jane?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      May 19, 2021

      Great Read
      5 min read

    • Article

      Moomins In The City

      Jun 11, 2021

      In 1964, when she was in her 50s, the Moomin creator Tove Jansson settled on her dream island. Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, “a rock in the middle of nowhere”, according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia

      5 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Jane

      Aug 31, 2023

      Becoming Jane
      3 min read

    • Article

      The real Mr Darcy

      Nov 2, 2022

      The real Mr Darcy
      8 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      May 19, 2021

      Great Read
      5 min read

    • Article

      Cheeky Blinder

      May 27, 2021

      Cheeky Blinder
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Village Affair

      Jul 14, 2021

      AS an attentive aunt, Jane Austen was keen to encourage her niece, Anna, with the novel she was writing. ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,’ she wrote to her in 1814, adding, ‘such a spot… is the delight of my

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Real Jane Austen

    5/5

    3 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      An excellent non-traditional biography filled with fascinating background detail and context to Jane Austen's life and work. It was thrilling to learn so much in this one book that was new to me about Austen and her extended circle. This is a real a tribute to Paula Byrne, as I've been a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America for years, read several previous biographies as well as the six novels (repeatedly), and attended Austen conferences. But now I'm seeing Austen's work in a new light thanks to Paula Byrne's creative approach. Highly recommended to all, whether you've read Jane Austen before or not.
    • 5/5
      Such a good book. I found myself dragging my feet on the last chapter and epilogue because I didn't want to be finished. Wonderful, clever concept to use significant artifacts to move the biography along and to more clearly illuminate Austen's life and works. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and recommend it highly!
    • 5/5
      This is an interesting book for fans of Jane Austen. It should not be the first biography that one reads, since it does not move through her life in a conventional manner and expects a certain amount of knowledge about her life. Instead, it enriches one's understanding of her life by focussing on an item that she would have been familiar with, and enlarges upon its associations with her life. I thought that it was very interesting and gave me a much better feel for Jane Austen as a person. The problem with biographies of famous people is that there is so much material that the book focusses entirely on their public life and accomplishments, and I am very grateful to Byrne for this different approach.For a basic biography, I would recommend Carol Shield's Jane Austen : a life, which is a reliable 120 page account of her life, although it lacks a bibliography. My current favorite among long biographies is John Halperin's The Life of Jane AustenThere are a variety of "specialized" books that focus on Jane Austen life such as Nigel Nicolson and Stephen Colover's The World of Jane Austen: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction which focuses on houses and places she lived in or visited; Audrey Hawkridge's Jane and Her Gentlemen: Jane Austen and the Men in Her Life and Novels which people who enjoy this book would probably also like.