• The book’s release will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the original publication of Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice.

• Paula Byrne draws on a wealth of new material, including the letters of Austen’s racy and influential cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, whose first husband was guillotined in the French Revolution and who then seduced and married one of Austen's favorite brothers. Other new information includes Austen’s knowledge of the naval lives of her brothers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, as well as her family’s connections with slave plantations in Antigua.

• This outstanding biography presents Austen as a thoughtful modern woman, revealing her wry sense of humor; her love of the theater and urban life; her astute political mind engaged with issues of class conflict, debates on women and marriage, slavery, war, the evangelical movement; and her savage, often subversive sense of irony.

• Paula Byrne’s offers a detailed reading of Austen’s life through her novels, and the novels through her life.
 
 

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things offers a startlingly original look at the revered writer through a variety of key moments, scenes, and objects in her life and work. Going beyond previous traditional biographies which have traced Austen’s daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester, Byrne’s portrait—organized thematically and drawn from the most up-to-date scholarship and unexplored sources—explores the lives of Austen’s extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Through their absorbing stories we view Austen on a much wider stage and discover unexpected aspects of her life and character. Byrne transports us to different worlds—the East Indies and revolutionary Paris—and different events—from a high society scandal to a petty case of shoplifting, She follows Austen on her extensive travels, setting her in contexts both global and English, urban and rural, political and historical, social and domestic—wider perspectives of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.

Literary scholarship has revealed that letters and tokens in Austen’s novel’s often signal key turning points in the unfolding narrative. This groundbreaking biography explores Jane's own story following the same principle. As Byrne reveals, small things in the writer's world—a scrap of paper, a simple gold chain, an ivory miniature, a bathing machine—hold significance in her emotional and artistic development. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things introduces us to a woman deeply immersed in the world around her, yet far ahead of her time in her independence and ambition; to an author who was an astute commentator on human nature and the foibles of her own age. Rich and compelling, it is a fresh, insightful, and often surprising portrait of an artist and a vivid evocation of the complex world that shaped her.