SOURCE: Harris, Jocelyn. Review of Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin. University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 3 (summer 1999): 796-801.

In the following excerpt, Harris compares Jane Austen: A Life to David Nokes's biography of Austen, finding Tomalin's work to be the superior of the two.

What riches—two biographies of Jane Austen in one year! David Nokes begins his flamboyantly: ‘Bengal, 1773. It is the rainy season in the Sunderbunds. Inside his lonely makeshift hut the Surgeon-Extraordinary sits writing a letter home to his wife in England. The livid orange sun is sinking over this dismal region of fetid salt-flats, swamp and jungle. …’ Claire Tomalin begins hers [Jane Austen: A Life] more quietly and locally: ‘The winter of 1775 was a hard one. On 11 November the naturalist Gilbert White saw that the trees around his Hampshire village of Selborne had lost almost all their leaves.’ Her final image is of...