Jane Austen: a life. David Nokes. 1997.

In this new biography of Jane Austen, David Nokes has re-examined her life and presents a picture of her which is less perfect but more full of dangerous excitement. Working from unpublished sources, he discloses the truth behind several disturbing Austen family secrets, and presents the conflicts in Jane Austen’s mind between her love of rural tranquillity and her restless fascination with the lure of wealth and fame. As Jane Austen wrote in another of her letters, ‘If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my fault.’