SOURCE: Wood, James. “Sense and Sensibility.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 November 1997): 3.

In the following excerpt, Wood asserts that Jane Austen: A Life is “a triumph of seasoned sympathy” and compliments Tomalin's biographical portrait, despite the lack of documentation on her subject.

English fiction flows from Jane Austen's pelisse as surely as Russian fiction does from Gogol's overcoat. She founded character and caricature at the same time, which is the essentially satirical, essentially English approach to fictional people. From her, Dickens learned that characters can survive on one attribute and still be fat with life. From her, Forster learned that characters do not have to change to be real; they must merely reveal more of their stable essences as the novel progresses. Yet at the same time, the first stirrings of what would become Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness are also found in Austen's novels; she invented a new semaphore...