Elizabeth Jenkins is a novelist and biographer who has followed her own path in disregard of fashion. As a biographer she has written on diverse subjects, but her reputation rests securely on three large-scale works: Jane Austen: A Biography (1938), Elizabeth the Great (1958), and Elizabeth and Leicester (1961). She sums up her creed in the introduction to Jane Austen: "This work can offer hardly any of the attractions that make fashionable biography so stimulating; on the subject of Jane Austen I myself have not felt able to be either patronizing or clinical; but I thought that some of her admirers who had not the leisure to make out a chronological account of her for themselves, might like to find it done for them." We notice that she offers, modestly, a "chronological account," not an "interpretation"; and we detect also a healthily anti-Stracheyan note in her disowning of biographical superciliousness. Jenkins...