For decades the biography of Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins was the standard one, but this longer, denser one seems likely to replace it. However, while odds and scraps of correspondence and other new material may float to the surface from time to time, there are no indications of any revelations to be made or that her outwardly uneventful life had any skeletons concealed in the closet. The daughter of an unmonied country rector and of a mother with aristocratic connections, she was not quite county" but mixed freely with that class and appears to have been socially secure. Eligible men sometimes entered her life, but she was devoted to her immediate family and, in any case, had little or no dowry to offer, so they drifted off again. Her relatives were tolerant, even proud of her novel writing at a time when women writers were considered rather an oddity, and in general her life seems to have been serene and happy until the advent of the internal illness probably Addison's disease - which killed her at some months short of 42. Though several of her novels were published anonymously, she found a following in her lifetime - including Sir Walter Scott, who reviewed her work favourably and with insight. In ways she appears to have been a very normal woman of her time and milieu, fond of family life, dancing, visits and well bred company, though also a great reader and with a strong inner life and a rigid code of duty. Some rather ponderous analysis of the novels does not spoil a solid, well considered biography.