Kathryn Sutherland. Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Book Review‪)‬

Kathryn Sutherland. Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 408. $125.00 cloth/$45.00 paper. The title of Kathryn Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood, may initially discourage some Austen scholars from seriously considering this work as equal to its projected wide-ranging critical agenda. But Sutherland only slightly overstates her achieved project, which is an ironic, though hardly dismissive survey of Jane Austen's many "textual lives": as an object of academic scrutiny, since R. W. Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition officially granted her works canonical respectability; and as beloved novelist, biographical subject and--particularly over the last few decades--cinematic darling--most recently co-opted in the biopic, Becoming Jane (2007). Sutherland analyzes the motives behind these varied texts, which have generally celebrated but also relentlessly tested Austen's "incandescent," to use Virginia Woolf's term, legacy of elusive authorship, second only to Shakespeare's in British literature. (1)