The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne – review

When Dickens' biographer and friend John Forster read the newly written Chapter 23 of Dombey and Son, he remarked on its similarity in tone and treatment to Sense and Sensibility. Dickens looked at his friend blankly: he had, he told him, never read a word of Jane Austen. Forster was shocked, as we might be, too, though the two great novelists seem to occupy different universes of life and art: Dickens with his vast, sprawling canvases, his desperate childhood and global celebrity; Austen with her perfectly etched provincial scenes, her calm, genteel life and anonymity. Dickens the Titan forging worlds, Austen the unworldly spinster ironically commenting on the train-train quotidien. It is this image of Austen – the view summed up by her nephew as "a life of usefulness, literature, and religion … not by any means a life of event" – that Paula Byrne seeks to refute.

Like all of Austen's biographers, she is faced with a dearth of evidence, owing to the family's destruction of most of her letters (only 160 out of thousands survive); Byrne's recourse is to approach her subject from a variety of angles, each suggested by an object connected to her. This method, of which Neil MacGregor has been such a strikingly successful practitioner, proves brilliantly illuminating. Byrne's first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, whose very title seemed almost oxymoronic, presented the novelist and the woman from an unexpected perspective. The Real Jane Austen similarly provides us with constantly surprising glimpses of her. Liberated from linear chronology, the book is like an advent calendar: each new object, each new chapter, brings another group portrait, with its own web of personal relationships and intellectual and imaginative associations. Byrne quotes Walter Scott's remarkably perceptive early appreciation of Austen – before he himself had become a novelist – in which he describes her work, with its "current of ordinary life … [and] its correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place", as analogous to the Flemish school of painting, and Byrne approaches her work as an art critic, examining the canvas minutely, identifying the palimpsests, the pentimenti, looking at what lurks in corners, unregarded, teasing out the narratives.

Sometimes her objects are works of art themselves. Her first chapter focuses on the silhouette commissioned by Austen's childless uncle Thomas Knight to commemorate his adoption of Jane's elder brother Edward, when the boy was 13. The description of the family scene – Jane's father and mother are shown handing the boy over to Mr and Mrs Knight – leads on to an account of Jane's brothers and sisters, among then the second son, George, who was epileptic and possibly deaf, which leads to other examples of mental infirmity within the extended family. Jane's clergyman father, George, took in boarders, among whom was the unruly John Wallop, son of the Earl of Portsmouth, who tried to hang a young boy from the tower of the village church; in later life, having succeeded to the title, he became known as the Vampyre Earl, on account of his alleged weakness for drinking the blood of his servants. All of this, riveting in itself, underlines the breadth of Austen's experience of life; spinsters in vicarages know more of the human condition at first hand than might be imagined.

The great merit of the book is not that it offers new research (though sometimes it does), or even new interpretations (though it does that, too, sometimes quite radically): by focusing, chapter by chapter, on one thread or another of Austen's experience, Byrne allows us to grasp the richness of her inner life. The last section of the "Family Profile" chapter, growing naturally out of Byrne's consideration of the children in the family, focuses on the idea and the importance of home, and Austen's passion for the poet William Cowper, whom she quotes in Mansfield Park: "with what intense desire she wants her home". Cowper was the author of The Task (commissioned by Jane's distant relative, Lady Austen) which is, in Byrne's words, "a fierce assault on contemporary society, condemning the slave trade, French despotism, fashionable manners and lukewarm clergymen". This is the work, note, of Austen's favourite poet. Little by little, Byrne gives us the contents of Austen's mind, which prove to be more varied than the popular image of her narrow provincial horizons suggests.

One of the most strikingly revealing chapters starts with an east Indian shawl, which unravels (so to speak) Austen's awareness of the colonial world, through her Aunt Phila, who gave her the fabric. Phila, trained as a milliner, got out of that trade to avoid segueing, as many of her sister milliners had done, into prostitution; she undertook the perilous voyage to India in search of a husband, whom she quickly found. She also found a lover, Warren Hastings, the future governor-general of India, by whom she had a daughter, Eliza; Eliza married a French count, who, as if in a subplot from A Tale of Two Cities, was guillotined when he returned to France at the height of the revolution, to reclaim his estates. All of this happened within Austen's most intimate family circle; Eliza, fiery, flirtatious, provocative, was an absolute favourite of Jane's. Far from repining in the sheltered world of the rectory, she was surrounded by sensational, exotic, dramatic life. No wonder, as Byrne says, her early writings, collected together in the vellum manuscripts of juvenilia which are another of the selected objects, are lurid in the extreme: "a family of alcoholics and gamblers, a young woman whose leg is fractured by a steel mantrap … a child who bites off her mother's fingers, a jealous heroine who poisons her sister".

Sometimes the choice of object is strained – a portrait of the Trevanion sisters seems not to have any connection to Austen herself, though the chapter itself, twining together ever tighter strands of sisterly feeling, especially those between Jane and her adored elder sister Cassandra, is one of the best; sometimes the starting point for a chapter is left far behind, leading to a certain loss of continuity. "The Daughter of Mansfield", on the other hand, starting with the double portrait of the daughters, natural and adopted, of Lord Mansfield, strikingly reveal not only the range of Jane's reading but also her steadfast commitment to the abolition of slavery. Mansfield's adopted daughter, Dido Belle, was of mixed race; Mansfield, as Lord Chief Justice, had powerfully supported the abolitionist cause in his judgements. Among the books Jane read were Charles Pasley's An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire and Thomas Clarkson's pioneering and visionary History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade; from the latter, she took the name of the infamous Robert Norris, traitor to the abolitionists, and attached it to the villain of Mansfield Park. Fearlessly, Fanny Price asks Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of a plantation in Antigua, the question posed by William Cowper: "We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?" Austen is scarcely parochially, provincially distant from the great historical movements of her own time; her own family was involved in the slave trade.

Another revealing chapter is called "The Barouche". The Reverend George Austen owned one of these state-of-the art vehicles, and Byrne vividly evokes the thrills and spills of this new high speed form of transport. But again, she uses it to note how well-travelled Jane was (within Britain that is – the continent was off-limits because of the seemingly unending wars with France). Again and again, following the trail suggested by her objects, finding directions out by indirections, Byrne opens out Austen's story with a novelist's persistent probing of the evidence. Austen's life, that of her family (only her mother, oddly, is uncharacterised), her relationship to her times, come to life, as Walter Scott said of Austen's novels, "finished up to nature, with a precision that delights the reader".