Peter Washington
Austen’s Onion
Becoming Jane Austen: A Life
By Jon Spence
Hambledon & London 294pp £19.95 order from our bookshop
Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide
By Deirdre Le Faye
The British Library 192pp £18.95 order from our bookshop
ONE OF THE stranger cultural symmetries of the last half century juxtaposes the rise of literary biography with increasing critical hostility to the very idea of authorship. Even as readers demand more and more information about the private lives of their favourite writers, scholars are demolishing the foundations on which biography is built by cutting the links between, in Eliot’s phrase, the man who suffers and the artist who creates.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'And there in the evening the bride and the gamekeeper
Wait with their faces averted, wait
For the signal to shift and the lamp to glow red
And a train to arrive, but not yet and not yet.'
'It Says Here', from Sean O'Brien's upcoming collection.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/it-says-here
https://literaryreview.co.uk/here-there-everywhere-2
Everyone must have been queueing up to review the new Craig Brown Beatles book, which is obviously brilliant – but kudos to @Lit_Review and @DrDominicGreen for conspiring to bring us this bravura reviewing performance (free to read)
@Lit_Review Wahey 🙆 Look at what's arrived today 😎👍🙏😁 Now 4 some proper lockdown reading 😍 God bless the workers 🙏👍