(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Top Comments: Jane Austen's Bookshelf [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-16
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney, added far too many titles to my TBR list.
But first, a word from our sponsor!
Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-), so we can credit you with the find!
The author noted a decades-long gap in the canon of books commonly taught in school, from the late 1700s through the early 1800s when Austen emerged. This is exactly the period when novels became popular, and most of them were written by women. Austen's biographers frequently describe her being influenced by Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare, yet brush past the female authors that Austen herself mentioned in her books and letters. When Romney noted the phrase "pride and prejudice" in a Frances Burney novel, she began researching Austen's predecessors.
The book delves into eight women writers, giving brief biographies and a discussion of their work. (Being a rare book dealer, Romney also waxes lyrical about covers and bindings; I'll admit to skimming those parts.) Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth wrote the sort of realistic novels that Austen perfected in Pride and Prejudice. Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels were compared with Shakespeare in her day; the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey is obsessed with Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen's Mansfield Park includes the characters staging a performance of Elizabeth Inchbald's Lover's Vows; Austen clearly assumed the play was familiar to her readers. The one book mentioned that I recognized was Charlotte Lennox's Arabella, or the Female Quixote, about a young woman who confuses romantic novels with reality. Austen updated this plot in Northanger Abbey.
These authors were once household names, influencing both male and female authors who followed. (Charles Dickens, for instance, was a major fan of Maria Edgeworth.) To understand how they were erased from the canon, Romney turns to Joanna Russ's brilliant How to Suppress Women's Writing. Every phenomenon that Russ mentions is applicable here. Radcliffe's Gothic novels were deemed a lesser genre, dismissed the same way romance novels are today. Burney and Edgeworth were pronounced inferior to Austen, as if only the single "best" exemplar of a genre was allowed (at least for women). Elizabeth Inchbald's works were called immoral (a charge that carries more weight against women authors). Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi was mostly discussed for her unconventional life instead of her works. A magazine floated an unsupported theory that the climactic chapter of The Female Quixote was authored by Charlotte Lennox's friend Samuel Johnson; this claim continued to be quoted long after it was thoroughly debunked.
When Joanna Russ wrote How to Suppress Women's Writing in 1983, there were no ebooks or internet to find out-of-print books. In reading Russ and others, Romney realizes that she, like Austen, fits into a tradition that others began. Romney quotes Russ's challenge at the end:
"I've been trying to finish this monster for 13 ms. pages and it won't. Clearly it's not finished.
You finish it."
(Cross-posted at my obscure website.)
On to Top Comments!
From ecowyoming:
BalanceSeeker updates a famous “Oregon Trail” meme.
Top mojo, courtesy of mik:
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/16/2333693/-Top-Comments-Jane-Austen-s-Bookshelf?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
