Jane Austen's Bookshelf
A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure featuring “your favorite author’s favorite authors” (Today)—the women who inspired Jane Austen—that’s “a meditation on reading and writing, on honesty and self-discovery—and on what books can teach us, if we let them” (The Washington Post).
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.
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In this astute inquiry, rare books dealer Romney (coauthor of Printer's Error) profiles the largely forgotten women writers who influenced Jane Austen. Romney suggests that Austen's ambiguous endings that feature villains who escape their comeuppance reflect the imprint of Charlotte Smith, who wrote such feminist novels as Desmond to support herself and her children after separating from her husband left her destitute. Sexist double standards were a constant in the Georgian writers' lives, Romney notes, describing how the kind of brash literary criticism that earned Samuel Johnson fame brought mainly scorn for his contemporary, novelist Charlotte Lennox ("Women could be witty—but not too witty"). Incisively dissecting how Austen's forebears got written out of the English canon, Romney shows how late-19th-century male critics unfavorably compared them with Austen despite rarely pitting the era's male authors against her or each other, implying that the critics were only willing to recognize a single, token woman author. Romney also makes a vehement case that Austen's influences are major talents in their own right, as when she argues that Frances Burney's "straight talk" style enabled her to directly tackle such topics as catcalling that Austen's subtler approach handled only incidentally. This is a must for Janeites.
