This highly enjoyable account of the life of Jane Austen is regarded as the classic biography of one the greatest English novelists. It illustrates not only the character and opinions of an unusually perceptive and gifted woman, but also the social life amongst the county gentry of Georgian England. Outside her writing, Jane Austen's main interest was her large and affectionate family and their circle of friends. This is the world she so brilliantly depicted in her novels, and Elizabeth Jenkins shows how often the settings and characters mirrored the writer's own life in Hampshire.