SOURCE: Keates, Jonathan. “Not So Plain Jane.” Spectator 286, no. 9004 (3 March 2001): 48.

In the following review of Jane Austen, Keates praises Shields's depiction of Austen and her career, and values the focus within the biography on Austen's artistic development.

Until recently, the popular image of Jane Austen's life was that of an untroubled idyll, led against Regency backdrops which combined English pastoral cosiness with the dash and frou-frou of Bath as portrayed for us on boxes of ‘Quality Street’ chocolates. She wasn't lucky with men of course, but then, cynics might argue, who is? Her death from an unspecified disease was premature and quite possibly agonising, yet she faced it with Christian resignation in a nice house in Winchester, where her brothers interred her in the north aisle of the cathedral, under a ledger stone which, while praising ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’, completely failed to mention the six...