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
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish
Our pre-publication copies of #OneLoveChigusa by #SojiShimada have just arrived! An homage to Osamu Tezuka from #Japan’sManOfMystery
- trans by Sir David Warren (former UK ambassador to Japan). The 6th title in the #RedCircleMinis series. Pub date: 6/08/20 #島田荘司 #手塚治虫