SOURCE: Bradbury, Malcolm. “A Woman for All Seasons.” New Statesman 126, no. 4356 (17 October 1997): 45-6.

In the following review, Bradbury discusses the vicissitudes of Austen scholarship and offers a positive assessment of several new biographies on Austen, including Jane Austen: A Life.

“Jane Austen,” wrote the Old Master, Henry James, “was instructive and charming … For signal examples of what composition, distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere.”

This was a common judgment in its day; but for a century we have been upturning it. Today nobody can dismiss Miss Austen. She flourishes as never before. Her books appear in best-seller lists, versions of her work bounce across film and TV screens, in a travestied flurry of balls, carriage rides, walks through friendly woods. She attracts feminist sympathy, romantic identification, theme-park nostalgia, Georgian revivalism, Tory appreciation, Marxist approval...