Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend- Rebecca Romney
Simon & Schuster
Release Date: February 18, 2025
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Synopsis: 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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What is a classic and how does it become one? We can probably all name some "classic novels", maybe even some "great American novels", even if we've never read them. And almost all of the early ones will have been written by men, with the undisputed exception of Jane Austen.
Jane Austen's Bookshelf explores the authors Austen herself enjoyed reading, and the ones who influenced her own writing: Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth specifically. These authors are mentioned in Austen's letters and novels, they were among the best sellers of her day. Author Rebecca Romney takes us on two adventures: she explores the lives of each of these remarkable women- their lives, their triumphs, tragedies, and how they came to fall from best selling author status off of the canon of "must-read English authors"; Romney also takes us on her modern journey of discovering these authors herself.
As a rare book seller and a lover of Jane Austen books, Romney wanted to read the books Austen read and find out what she enjoyed reading. Did they stand up to the test of time or did they deserve their fall off their pedestals as brilliant writers? As much as I enjoyed the biographies Romney crafted of the writers themselves, I enjoyed her discoveries of these women, their lives, their books, and their reinterpretations over the centuries possibly more. Her descriptions of finding the copies of the rare book edition that speaks to her for her own collection, her discoveries of her own particular prides and prejudices towards certain kind of books and how she changes her thinking, and the books themselves, are all wonderful.
Romney makes sure Jane Austen's Bookshelf is never a dull read. If you decide after reading this to add Burney, Lennox, and any of the other women's works (and their biographies) to your TBR piles like I have, Romney includes a wonderfully helpful appendix "Selected Books from the Jane Austen Bookshelf" to get you started.
Not a daunting, scholarly work, but readers who enjoyed Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists or Ramie Targoff's Shakespear's Sisters and the forgotten- or purposely overlooked- women writers will enjoy Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf for many of the same reasons.
I received a DRC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
