to celebrate 200th anniversary of Pride & Prejudice

The Real Jane Austen

I stopped to look on the library shelf and there is another 
Jane Austen biography.  The skeptic in me whispered 
something negative in my mind but then I saw the subtitle:

A Life in Small Things

Very intrigued now. 
It is the first book I looked at tonight and started to read. 
Paul Johnson, the British historian and columnist for The Guardian, 
said of Paula Bryne's first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, 
" the best book on Jane Austen." In 2011, Paula made a BBC
documentary about her discovery of Jane Austen portrait , thought by many
experts to be the only professional portrait of the novelist painted 
from life.. Byrne lives in Oxford to another writer Jonathan Bates ( Shakespeare 
scholar). It was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Pride and 
Prejudice. 

So with all this information, I opened the book. 




The portrait: 



The pencil drawing on vellum is inscribed "Miss Jane Austin" on the back. Byrne insists that "apart from the striking family resemblance", this was the first clue as to the identity of the sitter..
"They believe it dates to about 1815, before Austen died in 1817."

Author talks here:

I found this series on The Real Jane Austen: