Unlike the conventional cradle to grave biography, Jane Austen: A Life in Small Thingsfocuses on a variety of key moments, scenes, and objects in both the life and work of Jane Austen. Paula Byrne proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, but her chapters offer absorbing narrative stories while opening a window onto unexpected aspects of Austen's life and character. It is well known that Jane Austen was born in 1775 into a family of eight children, including her beloved sister Cassandra, and lived a life of respectable gentility. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published in 1811, and was followed by Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Biography after biography has tracked Jane Austen's daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester. But Paula Byrne explores the lives of Austen's extended family, her friends and her slighter acquaintances. Through these stories, we suddenly see Austen on a much wider stage than that on which she is confined in the more conventional biographies, beginning with those of her own clerical brothers. We are transported to the East Indies and the West, to the guillotine in revolutionary Paris, to a world where there is high society scandal one moment and a petty case of shoplifting the next. Byrne's biography follows Austen on her travels, which were more extensive than is often recognized, and it sets her in contexts global as well as English, urban as well as rural, political and historical as well as social and domestic. These wider perspectives were of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life. Small things in Jane Austen's world-a scrap of paper, a simple gold chain, an ivory miniature, a bathing machine-do not only evoke distant places. They are also the bearers of big emotions. Letters and tokens often signal to the readers of an Austen novel a key turning point in the emotional unfolding of the narrative. Jane Austen: A Life in Small Thingsis an attempt to write Austen's life according to the same principle. The result is a rich and compelling book, a fresh, insightful, and often surprising portrayal of Jane Austen, and a vivid evocation of the complex world which shaped her life and work.