SOURCE: Nicolson, Nigel. “Not Fanny Price, More Mary Crawford.” Spectator 279, no. 8826 (27 September 1997): 41-2.

In the following positive review, Nicolson compliments Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life and David Nokes's biography on the same subject.

It is not difficult to explain the continuing popularity of Jane Austen's novels: they are love stories that improve with every reading. More puzzling is the constant demand for new biographies of her, when there is little new evidence to discover. Here we have two experienced biographers re-arranging the same documents with such skill that each could say of the other, ‘I wish I'd thought of that.’ But any new biography must suffer from our familiarity with the outlines of the story which the accumulation of new detail does little to enhance. To discover new territory the authors are bound to reach out further and further from the central figure.

Thus Claire Tomalin writes at...