SOURCE: Moore, Honor. “A Heart Not Mended.” New Leader 131, no. 2 (9 February 1998): 18-19.

In the following review of Jane Austen: A Life, Moore commends Tomalin's evocation of Austen's life and times, but finds shortcomings in Tomalin's failure to probe the links between Austen's life and fiction.

The arrival of Claire Tomalin's latest biography [Jane Austen: A Life] sent me back to the unadulterated fictions that were composed some 200 years ago by the unmarried daughter of a clergyman as she sat in a corner of the parlor—and supposedly shoved the manuscript she was working on beneath a blotter whenever someone entered the room. By the time I got to Tomalin's puncturing of that myth—Jane Austen's manuscript pages were too large to fit under her blotter—Mansfield Park had saved me, also the unmarried daughter of a clergyman, from the travails of Christmas. As toddler nieces and nephews tore...