Reviewer ANNA CREER looks at three new books centred on different insights of the life of English author Jane Austen.

In the biographical notice published as a preface to Jane Austen’s posthumous novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, Henry Austen created an idealised image of his sister, Jane, claiming “she never uttered either a hasty or a silly or a severe expression, nor comment with unkindness”.

The Austen family perpetuated the myth for most of the 19th century but Austen’s letters first published in 1932, edited by RW Chapman, reveal a different Austen: ironic, witty, judgemental and critical, and at times outrageous in her observations of those around her.

Only 161 letters survive from an estimated 3000 and scholars and readers have searched them for clues about the real Jane Austen ever since.

In Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (Yale University Press), Hilary Davidson has researched what the letters reveal about what Jane Austen wore, discovering references to 32 gowns, 11 coats and wraps, 13 pieces of headwear, 15 accessories and trinkets, four pairs of shoes and many undergarments.

Davidson argues that Austen “reveals herself to be alert to fashion, and how to purchase and incorporate its changes into her wardrobe… and seems never to have actually fallen out of style”.

Davidson groups together items in the way Regency clothing would have been stored, creating a virtual wardrobe, showing how Austen’s wardrobe grew and developed over time. Relevant colour illustrations bring the extracts from Austen’s letters to life.

Only two items of clothing worn by Jane Austen survive. The silk pelisse coat dated 1812-14, in the collection of the Hampshire Cultural Trust, reveals that Austen was tall and slim, matching a contemporary description of her being “a tall, thin, spare person with very high cheekbones”.

The other is a muslin shawl, held at Jane Austen House, which family history claims Austen embroidered herself.

This the first time that all the surviving dress and jewellery that Austen owned have been published together and Davidson thanks both Jane Austen’s House for supporting her research and Austen herself for her “irony and amusement about clothes, shopping and taste [with] her tongue never far from her cheek”.

This insightful, beautifully presented book will engage both scholars and Austen fans alike.

IN 1832, Henry Austen revised his biographical notice and included a new anecdote about his sister being invited by a nobleman to join a literary circle at his house to meet the “celebrated” author Madame de Stael. “Miss Austen immediately declined the invitation. To her truly delicate mind such a display would have given pain rather than pleasure”.

Henry is emphasising his sister’s reticence about appearing in public as an author. Lord Byron, the most celebrated author of his day, accepted the nobleman’s invitation to meet de Stael.

For Christine Kenyon Jones, there’s the tantalising prospect that Austen and Byron could have met.

In Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Regency Relations (Bloomsbury Academic), Jones explores how, despite being presented as opposites, their lives, interests and work brought them within touching distance. 

Distantly related by marriage, Austen and Byron shared the same publisher, John Murray and, although they didn’t meet, for Jones “the two writers were sometimes surprisingly close to each other in their lives and their works”.

We know Austen read Byron because she tells Cassandra of reading The Corsair, the literary sensation of 1814. But did Byron read Austen? We know he owned first editions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and there are echoes of Persuasion (1817) in Byron’s Don Juan (1819).

It was WH Auden in 1937 who first commented that people were reading more Austen than Byron. Almost a century later Jones suggests Byron would be shocked by the growth of Austen’s fame that has overtaken his own.

Jones cannot prove Austen and Byron met, but she does weave together fascinating stories of the Regency world that they both inhabited.

MUSIC was an important part of Jane Austen’s life. She played the piano for her own entertainment and for country-dances for her nieces and nephews. 

It is also reflected in her novels, where the performance of music is subtly used to reveal character, to create atmosphere or, as in Persuasion, to accelerate the ending.

Gillian Dooley, in She Played and Sang. Jane Austen and Music (Manchester University Press), concentrates on the music directly connected with Austen, especially the songs, devoting a chapter to the songs of the British Isles in the Austen music collection. Poignantly, in her conclusion, she reveals the last four songs Austen sang.

For Dooley, Austen’s love of playing and singing inevitably contributed to the musicality of her prose.