| Author: |
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David Cecil
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| Title: |
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A Portrait of Jane Austen |
| Moochable copies: |
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No copies available |
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| Topics: |
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| Binding: |
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Hardcover |
| Pages: |
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| Date: |
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1978 |
| ISBN: |
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B006X167NO |
| Publisher: |
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Book Club Edition |
| Weight: |
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1.76 pounds |
| Size: |
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6.85 x 9.29 x 0.94 inches |
| Edition: |
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Reprint |
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| Description: |
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Product Description
Lord David Cecil, for twenty-one years professor of English Literature at Oxford University, is President of the Jane Austen Society. 'Appropriately enough,' he writes in the Prologue to this book, 'it was on a visit to an eighteenth-century country house that I first made the acquaintance of Jane Austen. There, in its drawing room, with the portraits of powdered and beruffled ladies and gentlemen staring down at me from the faded silk of the walls and the tall windows open onto stretches of parkland hazy in the light of a fine September evening, my mother opened Pride and Prejudice and began to read it aloud to me. She went on with it during the days that followed. By the time she had finished, I was wholly under the spell of the author. This happened well over sixty years ago and the spell is still working.'
A portrait of Jane Austen is intended neither as a straightforward biographical narrative nor as a critical study of Jane Austen's works, but rather as an attempt to reconstruct her life and character, drawings on her letters, her novels, and the recollections of her contemporaries.
Often as an obscure figure living in a small, dull world, Jane Austen is here revealed as a strong, unusually delightful personality, reflecting a lively and important cross-section of eighteenth-century and Regency society and observing and commenting on her milieu with enchanting irony and wit. In an age that David Cecil describes as valuing 'good sense, good manners and cultivated intelligence, rational piety and a spirited sense of fun,' she was very much at ease. 'Some people,' he remarks, 'are well worth knowing even as acquaintances. Jane Austen is one of them. She reveals herself in her letters and records as...observant, perceptive, amused, perhaps formidable, certainly intriguing and all the more so because she seems very different from the conventional idea of an author of genius.' His splendidly illustrated re-creation of Jane Austen's world - social and...
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| URL: |
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http://bookmooch.com/B006X167NO |
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