![]() ![]() ![]() They included an immigrant entrepreneur, a young clergyman whose grandparents were an actress and a duke, an MP more interested in hunting than Parliament, and a deranged earl beset by scandals to rival anything found in the Gothic fiction of the day. The Austens' Hampshire neighbours were also a diverse and eccentric bunch. From her study of family papers, Tomalin is able to paint a rich, tragi-comic picture of the Austen clan, their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances and their exotic connections with India and France. They were meritocrats, struggling to get ahead in the competitive and money-driven society of England under George III. The family into which she was born was neither landowning nor prosperous. The Jane Austen w ho emerges from Claire Tomalin's biography is a slightly different figure, however - a woman who lived on the edges of the society she described, looking in at it from the outside. Or so generations of admiring readers have supposed. It is a world she knew because it was the world she herself inhabited. The six great novels of Jane Austen picture a world of civility, reassuring stability and continuity. ![]()
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