A Biographer's Blog

A major theme in my biography of Hosmer is how she and her supporters shaped her public image and the difference between her public and private selves.  I was therefore very interested in the story on NPR about the role Austen’s editor played in her writing.  While Austen’s brother had claimed “Everything came finished from her pen,” the Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland has found a very different story in her close examination of Austen’s manuscripts.  Sutherland suggests Austen fans and scholars stop ‘polishing Austen’s halo’ and dig into the process of how her works took on the form we know and love, for we hold few other author’s to such high standards.  A fascinating tale.