LIVING WITH JANE AUSTEN

Celebrating a beloved writer.

British biographer, novelist, memoirist, and literary scholar Todd admits that she was late in discovering Jane Austen. “She wasn’t my childhood passion,” she writes, but certainly Austen has become a significant focus of her scholarship: Todd edited the Cambridge edition of Austen’s works and is deeply knowledgeable about her life and times. In an engaging melding of memoir and literary analysis, Todd offers a close reading and personal response to Austen’s most indelible characters, including Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and the Dashwood sisters, Marianne and Elinor, as well as the men, relatives, friends, and neighbors with whom they interacted. As she reflects on Austen, Todd charts her own path as a scholar, first in England and then in the U.S., where she studied and taught at a time when women’s studies and French critical theory were shaping English departments. Both perspectives informed Women’s Friendship in Literature, her book about intimate relationships in women’s fiction and in their authors’ real lives. Austen appeared in that book, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, the subject of another of Todd’s biographies, who also features significantly in this current volume. Besides responding to Austen’s fiction, Todd takes a discerning—and admiring—look at her letters: “mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people—some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment—and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine.” Although Todd finds the letters captivating, the novels have proven most revelatory for her, spreading “out and round me like rich material, a shot silk of rippling ambivalence, of passion and affection, temperamental undercurrents, neediness and intellectual solitude, confusions clarified, resilience, exertion and stillness—and love (however ironised).”

A gift for Austen’s devoted readers on the 250th anniversary of her birth.