Almost inadvertently, I’ve spent the last few months immersed in the world of Jane Austen. My husband decided to listen to an audiobook of Persuasion, so I joined him, and I didn’t stop till I’d listened to all six novels. It was such a delight that I watched the movies and TV series and then realized I had books about Austen in every room just waiting to be read, and there are so many Austen-influenced novels out there that, with hardly any effort, I could probably stay in this bubble for the next two to four years, as necessary.
Before going any further, I’d like to sing the praises of Juliet Stevenson. She’s not the only good audiobook narrator in Austenland, but once I downloaded her performance of Emma (Naxos, 16 hours and 39 minutes), there was no going back—and, fortunately, she’s recorded them all. The vivid vocal personality she creates for each character underlines Austen’s humor and precision, making it easy to follow the narratives as they loop in and out of various perspectives.
It may have been Karen Joy Fowler who started the most recent boom of Austeniana with The Jane Austen Book Club (Marion Wood/Putnam, 2004), a delightful novel about five women who meet regularly to discuss their favorite writer, and one man who’s never read Austen before (he’s a science fiction fan) but comes along for the ride. Our starred review calls it “bright, engaging, dexterous literary entertainment.”
Most of the Austen books on my shelves are nonfiction. Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) starts with a mystery: Why only five—is Cohen completely discounting Northanger Abbey? During a turbulent time in her life, with the birth of her first child overlapping the illness and death of her father, Cohen found herself reading virtually nothing but Austen—for seven years. Our review calls this “a nuanced portrait of a writer and reader,” and though I haven’t finished it yet, I find myself wanting to know how the pandemic and subsequent events have affected Cohen’s reading habits.
In A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (Penguin Press, 2011), William Deresiewicz reinstates that missing sixth novel while exploring the ways that reading Austen changed his life. Each chapter discusses one novel and the lesson the author took from it on his way to becoming an English professor, and our review says he “smartly finds the practical value of Austen’s prose without degrading her novels into how-to manuals.”
Rebecca Romney takes an interesting approach in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest To Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend (Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster, Feb. 18), searching out writers Austen read herself, including Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe—whose The Mysteries of Udolpho plays a big role in Northanger Abbey, which Romney says “is rarely an Austen reader’s favorite, but it is mine.” I think I know where I’m going to start my re-rereading.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
