《简・奥斯丁》讲述了：Jane Austen is one of the best-known and best-loved authors in the Englishspeaking world. Her works are enduringly popular, always in print, and are frequently adapted for stage, screen and television. Yet the writer herself is often felt to be something of an enigma, her thoughts and feelings relayed to us only through her surviving letters and in the accounts and memoirs of her family members. In this lively illustrated biography, Deirdre Le Faye emphasises the importance of Jane's family connections in developing the milieu from which she drew the inspiration for her novels. Her brothers' experiences at sea, her cousin Eliza's marriage to a French count, later executed during the French Revolution, her aunt's trial on a trumped-up theft charge, all served to bring the wider world into Jane's drawing room. The illustrations, drawn from The British Library's unparalleled collection of literary manuscripts and many other sources, attractively complement the text in conveying the people and places that Jane knew, and the social fabric of her world.