Whatever happened to dear Aunt Jane?

In 1818, an unknown critic in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine went out on something of a limb. One day, he claimed, Jane Austen would be among the most popular of English novelists. By the middle of the century, with George Henry Lewes complaining that she’d been unjustly forgotten, this claim must have seemed even more unlikely than it did at the time. Only with the 1869 publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh did the tide begin to turn, and her books to be more widely read.

But, as we now know, that anonymous critic turned out to be a master of understatement. These days, you can trumpet your love of Austen with key rings, mugs, calendars and fridge magnets. You can wear barbecue aprons proclaiming ‘Let’s BBQ Wickham’ or ‘Who invited Mr Collins?’, and any number of T-shirts with variations on the theme of ‘Mr Darcy is mine!’ In 2012 scientists at the University of Liverpool identified a pheromone in the urine of male mice that makes them irresistible to females — and duly named it Darcin. Cue this month’s 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, and another officially sanctioned bout of Austen mania.

Of the two books here, the more ambitious is Paula Byrne’s. As in her previous Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, Byrne takes a weirdly sniffy view of conventional biographers, with their tendency to proceed ‘from cradle to grave at an uneventful pace’. Her own approach, she assures us, will be far more exciting. Presumably influenced by the success of Neil MacGregor’s 100 objects, she takes 19 of her own, each one launching a discussion of a different aspect of Austen’s life and work.

At times, the link between object and theme is fairly straightforward: the vellum notebooks of Austen’s teenage writings lead to a sharp, informative analysis of their irreverent and hugely precocious contents.