V. S. Rutherford

This is a very interesting book. It isn't what I expected. I thought it would be the Juvenilia itself. Instead it is, just as it says, a guide to these works. There is great background information and quotes from her early stories. It also has quotes from Austen's better known titles. I didn't completely understand the bold print quotations and what they were meant to convey. I'd love to get a collection of Jane Austen's juvenilia and read it along side this. I'm sure it would be enlightening. I'm glad to have received a copy from LibraryThings giveaways so that I can delve further into these fascinating tales.… (mehr)

This book is a good book to know about Jane Austen's Juvenilia--as the subtitle says, it is "A Guide to Jane Austen's Juvenilia". The book gives a detailed analysis of each piece in Jane Austen's three volumes of juvenilia, which is informative. However, the author then goes on to try to connect each story to what was happening in Jane Austen's life, and with that I'm not sure how much is accurate and how much is not. So, the main title, "Jane Austen had a life!", is a little more circumspect, because the author presents as fact that Jane Austen had a brief marriage to a D'Arcy Wentworth--yet I can find no other evidence online about it. I believe the author is basing most of her thinking on this aspect of Jane Austen on a book written by someone I believe is her relative--Wal Walker's Jane & D'Arcy: Volume 1: Folly Is Not Always Folly and Volume 2: Such Talent & Such Success. Not many scholars subscribe to this connection between Jane Austen and D'Arcy Wentworth, and so at the end of her book, she mentions how no one can buck the thinking of the "Janeite militia". So as a guide to Jane Austen's juvenilia, I find this book helpful, but as to historical fact, I am not sure what to believe.… (mehr)

On my first reading of Jane Austen Had a Life I came away thinking it was very dense with interesting information from a variety of sources including biographers such as Virginia Wool, John Halperin, and E. M. Forster. In addition to Jane's life Rutherford includes small biographies of people to whom Austen dedicated her stories: Miss Lloyd, Francis William Austin, and the beautifull Cassandra, to name just a few. On my second reading I was distracted by repetitive information, the format being strange with choppy paragraphs, and frequent little one-line quotes everywhere. Maybe this is Australian, but style is also very different with italics and unusual spellings.
The biggest draw of Jane Austen Had a Life was not to discover secret love affairs or an exciting social life of Ms. Austen, but rather the summaries of Austen's juvenilia. Having never read any of it, Rutherford's compilation was thorough and well researched. This is not for the casual reader.… (mehr)

I was given this book in LT Early Reviewers in exchange for a review.

This self-published book about Austen's juvenilia has many virtues. One is simply existing as a handy reference guide to the minor works. For me, as someone who has long had a copy of the juvenilia but never actually read them, it was interesting to read the summaries of what the works are about and how they show up things which would later emerge in the major novels. The books illustrates connections to Austen's large family, which is important as many of the works were written for family entertainment. So this helps towards a wider understanding of the context in which Austen learnt her craft.

The book is reasonably well-produced. It has no illustrations, but they would perhaps be superfluous. I did not care for the way in which large chunks of quotations appear as italicised words within the main text rather than being put in blockquotes. It is not always clear when a quote is actually from one of the major novels, used to illustrate a theme.

Some minor points – I saw some small factual errors (eg one on the dates of French kings), and the occasional larger one (in the analysis of Austen's very biased 'The History of England' it is stated by the author that Lady Jane Grey's father-in-law was King Edward VI........no). And due to the way it has been written, ie one section on each Austen piece, there is sometimes duplicated biographical information.

One last warning – the reader should ignore everything said in the book about Darcy Wentworth. And this includes by implication the book's title, because to judge from that and the last section of the 'conclusion' the author seems desperate to show that JA had a more 'thrilling' life than she did in actuality - rather than accepting that Austen was an extraordinary person in a very ordinary situation. But you only have to read JA's letters to know that the boundaries for her were only external, not in her mind. It is true that the effect of this aberrant inclusion is uneven – it hardly affects some of the sections of the book. But for that on 'Love and Freindship' for example, it is significant. The author compounds this by not understanding the legal significance of Scottish marriages for people who lived in England.

So overall then, useful – but it comes with a health warning.… (mehr)