SOURCE: Mairs, Nancy. “Single Blessedness.” Women's Review of Books 15, no. 8 (May 1998): 13.

In the following review, Mairs asserts that with Jane Austen: A Life, Tomalin creates “a social and familial context for her subject more substantial than most.”

Most novels, no matter how much I've enjoyed them, don't beg to be reread; and of those that do, the majority rests in the “someday” pile. Some I have read obsessively during one phase of my development and then set aside forever. In junior high school, I raced through a historical romance, Anya Seton's Katherine, time and again; a little later, it was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Were I to return to these today, I suspect I'd find little of interest in them but the echoes of my adolescent preoccupations with sex and autonomy. But a few—the ones that make me wish I really could be marooned on a desert...