Bharat Tandon
Material Girl
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
By Paula Byrne
HarperPress 380pp £25 order from our bookshop
Introducing his pioneering Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s letters in 1932, R W Chapman felt the need to make a concession to readerly taste:
the enchantment which enthusiasts have sometimes found in these letters will not be universally admitted. It will be admitted by those only in whose own experience little things – like nicknames, or family jokes, or the arrangement of the furniture – are inseparable from the deeper joys, and even from the deeper sorrows of life; and by those only who find wisdom and humanity in this correspondence, as well as – or in spite of – its devotion to minutiae.
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