Book excerpt: First published in 1939, Jane Austen and Her Art is a landmark in Jane Austen criticism. This was the first book to provide a full-scale account of the writer based upon thoroughhistorical and biographical scholarship; and on the critical front, Mary Lascelles broke new ground in applying the ideas of Henry James on the 'art' of the novel. In the years since the first publication of Jane Austen and Her Art, there has come an overwhelming body of critical writing about Jane Austen. But this classic study maintains its unique position, unchallenged and unimproved upon in its analysis of Jane Austen's style and narrative art and the experience of life and literature which formed the novels. A book for all students of Jane Austen, it is equally, as Winifred Husbands wrote in the Modern Language Review, a book for 'all lovers of Jane Austen'.