Janine Barchas & Isabel Greenberg's "The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Author and illustrator

Professor Barchas teaches at the University of Texas in Austin and has written several books about Jane Austen including Matters of Fact Jane Austen and The Lost Books of Jane Austen which investigates the spread of Jane’s popularity across economic, cultural and geographic barriers through the medium of less expensive editions of her work published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Barchas has curated several exhibitions about Jane Austen including WhatJaneSaw.org. and her latest book, a collaboration with Isabel Greenberg, The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography, is being translated into several languages.  

Isabel Greenberg is a UK graphic novelist and illustrator. She has created three graphic novels, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013) The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016) and Glass Town (2020) which looks at the four Bronte children and the detailed imaginary world they created. She has also illustrated several children’s books. Her latest work with Professor Barchas is The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography.

Brief description of The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography

We first meet Jane as a teenager in this graphic biography in London as she and her brother Frank attend an exhibition of illustrations of the works of Shakespeare. In Chapter 2 we find Jane walking around the muddy family farm attached to the parsonage in Steventon and musing on landscape architect Capability Brown. We see her father Reverend Austen tutoring students and share the heartache of her sister, Cassandra, over the death of her fiancé. Jane is already writing and thinking of characters. Her father invites her to read from her new manuscript First Impressions (the first title for Pride and Prejudice) which he then sends off to a publisher.  But sadly, Jane’s first work is rejected. Chapters 3 to 5 take Mrs Austen and her two daughters to Bath for a visit with her brother, James and his wife. Jane and Cassandra haunt the bookshops, visit a folly and ruins and an ancient chapel, which prove fertile places for ideas for Jane’s writing.  Their uncle and aunt kindly hold a party for them. In Chapter 6 the Reverend Austen announces his retirement and decision to move to Bath to the consternation of the sisters. Bath does not prove a happy place for them as not long after their arrival their father dies, leaving his wife and daughters in a struggle to make ends meet without his pension. While the brothers offer to help the three women’s hope of an inheritance from the estate of a wealthy relative is unrealised and they travel to the port city of Southampton where they join brother Frank and his wife in a rented house at Castle Square.  Finally in 1809 in Chapter 10 the reader finds Jane and Cassandara and her mother moving into a sizable cottage on brother Edward’s estate at Chawton Hampshire where Jane will have her most productive years as a writer. The relief for all is palpable. In Chapter 13 Jane’s ill health worsens and at age 41 she dies in Winchester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. The final pages of the graphic biography take the reader to the present and to a celebration of Austen’s works of fiction which are enjoyed and read by millions around the world.

Distinctive features of The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography

• A beautiful introduction to the personal life of Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra (called Jenny and Cassy in the family) as author and illustrator collaborate in a new form of graphic biography for Jane Austen
• The biography opens with a teenage Jane and her brother visiting a gallery dedicated to illustrations of the works of Shakespeare and ends in the present, with the reader’s visit to Jane Austen House in Hampshire and Jane’s own gallery tribute
• Meticulous scholarship is evident in the text regarding the author, her literary works, and the period of Regency England, while the illustrations reflect the clothing, architecture and the period with prints of storefronts, fashion, houses, and castle and landscape views from Austen’s lifetime incorporated in the text  
• Jane Austen features as her own starring character in this graphic biography and the major moments in her life are emotionally and sometimes devastatingly portrayed, particularly the difficult periods of rejection and how even genteel poverty affected Jane’s life and her legacy
• The domestic life of Jane Austen emerges and with it the close personal lives of her parents and siblings, especially Cassandra and brother Frank
• The opening ‘Note to the reader’ reveals cheeky ‘Easter Eggs’ which have been placed in the text to reward fans with intertextual references to the popular film and television adaptations and with quotations from Austen’s work finding their way into Jane and Cassandra’s thoughts and speech   
• Greenberg represents Jane Austen with her signature bangs and the sisters appear in yellow or blue empire line dresses; the illustrator’s palette switches from pastel blue and yellow (reflecting as Professor Barchas says “the relative quiet of Austen’s life”) to vivid pinks and purples when representing Austen’s imagination and the inspiration for her characters and stories
• Professor Barchas reminds the reader that “Any biography of Austen, and there are many, exists at the intersection of speculation and research.”
• An eleven page glossary of sources can be found at the conclusion of the graphic form and throughout the biography remarks and additional information can be found in yellow boxes on the pages
• The authenticity of this account of Austen’s life reflects the extensive visual archive of Barchas and the wide-ranging research the collaborators undertook including their ‘field trip’ to the house in Hampshire, England, where Austen wrote most of her novels
• Barchas found the challenge of daring to bring Austen, potentially, “to a new audience … or at least a slightly expanded audience by venturing into unfamiliar literary terrain” to be an exciting if slightly terrifying one. 

Ways to use The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography in the classroom

Introduce the class to the author Janine Barchas through a YouTube presentation she gives for the Harry Ransome Center at the University of Austin on The Novel Life of Jane Austen. This presentation provides wonderful insights into the collaboration of the author and the illustrator in the creation of the graphic biography.  It's a real delight to see how the two women worked together with screen shots illuminating the genesis and development of the project.

Explore the genre

Graphic novels have exploded in sales, genres and sophistication. In an article ‘Graphic novels broaden their Appeal’ (September 9 2024) Brad Rouse wrote that graphic novels have enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity in the last five years and are now “the third best-selling genre (35 million books sold) in the U.S. and Canada, behind only general fiction (49 million) and romance (36 million)”. So, this new form is popular and “graphic novels’ are not even always novels. The term has gone from referring to a specific format to a wider form that can be graphic memoirs, autobiographies and biographies as well as novels. They are texts that speak directly to readers about the complex visual, auditory and printed world in which they live. They can involve intricate interplay between image, written text and space to form a new type of textual integrity. Students need to understand the changing conventions (just like film) for graphic novels and a good place to start is with Charged with Meaning 2nd edition ed Wayne Sawyer (2019) (Phoenix Education and Stefanie Lia’s Chapter 11 Exploring Graphic Novels in English. 

Once students have an idea of the codes and conventions for this form then they can start to appreciate and applaud the interaction between image and word. 

Read widely in the graphic form genre 

Allow students to read The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography Janine Barchas, illustrated by Isabel Greenberg and then select a second text from the following list: 

• The Complete Maus Art Spiegelman (graphic memoir)
• Song of the Blackbird Maria van Lieshout (graphic novel based on real events in World War Two) 
• Persepolis Marjane Satrapi (graphic autobiography) 
• Steve Jobs Insanely Great Jessie Hartland (graphic biography) 
• The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood illustrated Renée Nault (graphic novel) 
• Oxygen Mask Authored by Jason Reynolds Illustrated by Jason Griffin (graphic novel) 
• Tales from the Inner City Shaun Tan (graphic short stories)  

Students in groups create a compare and contrast chart on the way the authors and illustrators have used the form and the way style is explored in different ways in different texts.  

Alternatively, students might feel inspired to read one of the six Austen novels 

• Pride and Prejudice 
• Mansfield Park
• Sense and Sensibility 
• Emma  
• Northanger Abby 
• Persuasion

And then seek for references to their novel in the graphic biography. 

Writing in the mode of Jane Austen

“Every reader brings her own sensibility to Austen’s novels. You can read them for their intricately arranged marriage plots, for their sly humour, for what they say about women and the financial arrangements that underpinned their search for husbands, for their vivid representation of a particular stratum of English life at a particular time. To my mind, there’s no one like her for using comic observation to alleviate the sting or tiresomeness of a vexing situation. It helps to imagine: How would Jane have described this?” (my italics) Sarah Lyall The Essential Jane Austen The New York Times 17 July 2025 

Take an incident from your second text and try to imagine how Jane Austen would have described it. Now attempt a re-write in Jane Austen mode.  

Writing discursively  

Richard Glover’s columns in The Sydney Morning Herald are often an opportunity to study the discursive form and see the use of humour artfully presented. After introducing The Novel Life of Jane Austen ask students to read the Glover article ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that I’m suddenly addicted to period dramas’ and in groups to investigate how he uses humour to explore his addition to period drama and film. 

Relevant details in relation to the NSW English Stage 6 syllabus

Text requirements: The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography is a text by a Dutch American author and a British illustrator. It includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives.
Pair this text with resources from our Year 11 texts and study guides and Year 9 texts and study guides for a deeper study program.

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

Understanding and responding to texts A

A student analyses how meaning is created through the use and interpretation of increasingly complex language forms, features and structures EN5-URA-01

Connotation, imagery and symbol

• Analyse how figurative language and devices can be used to represent complex ideas, thoughts and feelings to contribute to larger patterns of meaning in texts, and experiment with this in own texts

Understanding and responding to texts B

A student evaluates how texts represent ideas and experiences, and how they can affirm or challenge values and attitudes EN5-URB-01

Perspective and context

• Understand how the personal perspectives of audiences are a product of historical and cultural contexts
• Analyse how texts can be understood or interpreted from different perspectives, and experiment with this idea in own texts
• Evaluate how texts can position audiences to accept, challenge or reject particular perspectives of the world, and reflect on this in own texts
• Analyse how elements of an author’s personal, cultural and political contexts can shape their perspectives and representation of ideas, including form and purpose
• Appreciate how all communication is a product of cultural context
• Explain how texts affirm or challenge established cultural attitudes and values in different contexts

Style

• Analyse how the distinctive aesthetic qualities and stylistic features of a text can shape and be shaped by its purpose, and experiment with this in own texts
• Evaluate how particular styles in text can be privileged according to context
• Examine the way an author’s distinct personal style shapes meaning in their work
• Appreciate how the style of a text can represent larger ideas of literary movements and genres

(English K-10 Syllabus 2022 © NSW Education Standards Authority for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2023) 

Connecting texts

Other graphic biography and autobiography

With Austen biography

With Jane Austen novels