Janet Todd

Some biographers suffer from an excess of source material concerning their subjects, and the resultant biographies are either very large or even run into several volumes. With Jane Austen, the reverse is the case; for many years documentation to confirm even the barest outline of her life remained scanty, so that most biographies were slight and feeble, bulked out with copious quotations from the novels. It was only at the end of the last century that a reasonably complete picture of Austen's life could be seen, based upon original research in family archives and civic records.