From the blurb;\"Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,\" Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight a few months before she died. Yet most traditional accounts of Jane Austen\'s life have insisted on portraying her as just a picture of perfection. Her brother Henry described her as \"faultless...as nearly as human nature can be\", and her sister Cassandra burned the majority of Jane Austen\'s private letters in order to preserve this image of her as a paragon of all the discreet and modest virtues. 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 excitment. Working from unpublished sources, he discloses the truth behind several disturbing Austen family secrets, and presents the conflicts in Jane Austen\'s mind between her love of rural tranquility 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.\"NB: Some edge wear and slight discolouring of pages. Comes with a dust jacket in very good condition.