I found this volume to be rather disappointing. As part of Harold Bloom's BioCritique series, its goal was to explore the writer's work from a biographical standpoint. Like other books of the series, it consists of a mini-biography of the author plus a few scholarly essays. Unfortunately, this work is irretrievably marred by the choice of contributors.

For the short biography of Jane Austen, the series editor(s) chose someone named Norma Jean Lutz -- a writer of romance fiction for adolescent girls. Lutz was a terrible choice, not only because she is no scholar but because her writing is amateurish and her biographical skills are minimal. Her account is peppered with assertions about what Jane "was thinking" at various times -- as if Norma Jean was there to read her mind. Further, instead of relying on original sources (such as the published volumes of Austen's correspondence) she quotes other authors who have taken excerpted quotes from her letters.

Three scholarly essays are included. The 24-page "Critique of Austen's Work" by Linnea Hermanson is rather good; I found the summaries of Austen's writings (published and unpublished) insightful and interesting. The second essay, Brian Wilkie's 28-page "Jane Austen: Amor and Amoralism" was originally published in 1992 in the Journal of English and German Philogy. It explores the author's work in terms of ethical, moral, and spiritual values. I found the essay to be an incomprehensible mass of academic sophistry from which I gained no insights or understanding. The final essay, Rachel Brownstein's "Jane Austen: Irony and Authority" fared little better with me, It first appeared in 1988 in Women's Studies and offers a feminist perspective from which I gained no knowledge or insights.

Overall, I find it hard to believe that the three essays are the among the best critical evaluations of Jane Austen's writing from a biographical standpoint as of 2002. Certainly, the selection of a writer of romance books (Norma Jean Lutz) was a terrible choice for a biography; one would think that the editor was unaware that Austen's books are *not simply "romance novels" written for dreamy teenage girls and their love-starved equivalents. And who was the editor? That turns out to be hard to say; over 600 volumes of literary commentary were published under Harold Bloom's name over a short span of years, and these were largely produced by a staff of graduate students and lowly assistants.

Harold Bloom did write an introductory essay for this volume, one that raises an interesting but arguable point. Noting that Jane Austen died at a fairly young age (age 41), he muses that given another 15 or 20 years of good health, we might have 15 to 18 novels of such splendor as her 4 greatest... and that her work would have continued to mature, such that now she "would be central to the world's culture". ( )