Jane Austen

Paula is one of the world’s leading experts on Jane Austen. She is celebrating Austen’s 250th anniversary with a new novel about her mysterious seaside romance, a forthcoming series for BBC Radio 4, and reissues of two earlier books.

Her biography The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice; the Times Literary Supplement said that it was “magnificent” and for Simon Callow in The Guardian it was “brilliantly illuminating … riveting.” Paula’s first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre , later revised and reissued as The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and why she is a hit in Hollywood, and then as Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, was described by the Times Literary Supplement as “definitive and pioneering,” by the Spectator’s reviewer as “the best book on Jane Austen I have ever read” and by Jane Smiley in the New York Times as “The most insightful analysis of the making of the Austen legacy.”

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