Yet it is the historically minded who have been of late most fascinating about Jane Austen. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas'' reads Austen's novels as those of a Tory feminist who actively combated the enlightened radicalism of Maria Edgeworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. A Family Record'' familiarizes us with Austen's local and domestic milieu. Her father and mother ran their house as a school and took in boys as boarders. They were people of no property but of some influence insofar as their near relations held estates or positions of power in the universities or the War Office.
Downward mobility appears to be good for several different kinds of writers.
It can make them watchful and ill at ease. It enabled Henry James, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, no less than Jane Austen. All these regained the upward curve of success by the force of their pens and this allowed their later work to become more confident and expansive. During the 11 years that Jane Austen awaited publication she wrote nothing at all. Claire Tomalin's biography sits uncomfortably between the complacent heritage view of Austen on television or film and the more dynamic historical view.