SOURCE: Butler, Marilyn. “Simplicity.” London Review of Books 20, no. 5 (5 March 1998): 3, 5-6.

In the following excerpt, Butler praises Jane Austen: A Life, but finds shortcomings in Tomalin's failure to examine the influence of contemporary literary works on Austen's development as a mature writer.

Do we need another Life of Jane Austen? Biographies of this writer come at regular intervals, confirming a rather dull story of Southern English family life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative—Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J. E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) and W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main messages to convey: that the author was a very domestic woman, and that outside her family she had no profound attachments or interests. Subsequent biographers rightly complain that...