Originally published in 1992. In an age when genteel women wrote little more than personal letters, how did Jane Austen manage to become a novelist? Was she an

Jane Austen’s minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between

"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."—Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "By