Jane Austen gave the world six unforgettable novels, but we know offensively little about Austen herself: almost all of the writer’s correspondence was destroyed after her death. Jane Austen's brother once said that his dear sister's life was extremely uneventful, and many biographers echo him, but Tomalin resolutely rebels against this opinion, fascinatingly talking about the vivid impressions of the short life of the writer: about the unhappy love of young Jane for a young Irishman, about her long visits to London, about her close friendship with her high-society cousin, whose French husband fell victim to the revolution and met death by guillotine, about the service in the Royal Navy of her sailor brothers (who rose to the rank of admiral) during the Napoleonic Wars and about their lives in the distant English colonies... The myth of the quiet old maid, provincial and homebody Jane Austen, whose ideas about the world did not extend beyond the outskirts of a Hampshire village, turns out to be untenable, as anyone who reads one of the best biographies of Jane Austen, first translated into Russian, will be convinced .