Almost every fact that can be known about Jane Austen is known already; her life would appear to have been squeezed dry. So a new biography might seem superfluous, but Paula Byrne’s book is not quite a biography.

Instead, she looks closely at several small objects — a topaz cross, a watercolour of Lyme Regis, a painting of two young women, one of whom is black — and shows how they illuminate key moments or themes in her life and work.

The two things we most want to know are why she did not marry, and what, exactly, she looked like.

This author, who is married to Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, owns a portrait of a stern-faced woman in her forties, holding a pen, which is labelled ‘Miss Jane Austin’. I, for one, would like to think it is the great novelist, but scholars disagree, and we shall never find out.

Paula Byrne believes that her subject was “far tougher, more socially and politically aware, and altogether more modern than the conventional picture of ‘dear Aunt Jane’ allows”.

She discusses her feelings about religion, slavery, the theatre, the world beyond England, the sea — and when we study the pictures, documents and little objects which surrounded her, all sorts of interesting facts come to light.

One theme is her long struggle to become a published, and ultimately quite successful author. This probably took most of her energy. Paula Byrne thinks that she was happiest in the company of her sister Cassandra, and, after some flirtations in her youth, preferred to remain single. It is a scholarly and deeply interesting book.

Paula Byrne will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 21, and is appearing at two events in Oxford this week (see Bookings, right). She is interviewed in the next issue of Limited Edition, published with The Oxford Times on February 7.