I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
I love every one of Jane Austen’s novels. I have no favorites, so I can’t recommend only one. They are so funny, but they’re also full of life, love, sadness, loss, families, friends, disappointments, and surprises.
They all end in a marriage, but so do Shakespeare’s comedies–it’s just what happens in a comedy, along with many other things. I’ve read them all more times than I can count but I always find something new to love every time I reread any of them.
Jane Austen revolutionized the literary romance, using it as a platform from which to address issues of gender politics and class consciousness among the British middle-class of the late eighteenth century. The novels included in this collection from the elegant Knickerbocker Classics series-Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan-represent all of Austen's complete novels, and provide the reader with an entrance into the world she and her memorable characters inhabited.
With witty, unflinching morality, Austen portrays English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close and the nineteenth century began.…
This book tells us more about what Jane Austen looked like in real life than any drawing does. I love how Hilary Davidson delves into every possible piece of evidence for what she wore and provides illustrations from contemporary drawings and actual bits of clothing that survive.
Some of them actually belonged to Austen–like her turquoise ring and topaz cross, her lace shawl, and her brown silk pelisse. How amazing is it to see these items that Austen herself wore and to see the evidence that she was over 5 foot 6 inches tall!
Hilary Davidson delves into the clothing of one of the world's great authors, providing unique and intimate insight into her everyday life and material world
What did Jane Austen wear?
Acclaimed dress historian and Austen expert Hilary Davidson reveals, for the first time, the wardrobe of one of the world's most celebrated authors. Despite her acknowledged brilliance on the page, Jane Austen has all too often been accused of dowdiness in her appearance. Drawing on Austen's 161 known letters, as well as her own surviving garments and accessories, this book assembles examples of the variety of clothes she would have…
There are more comprehensive biographies of Jane Austen, but I love this one, which charts the relationship between Jane and her favorite brother, Henry. He was a banker for a while but also a soldier and became an Anglican minister.
E.J. Clery has done tons of research but she also writes beautifully and brings it all together into a moving and fascinating story that shows a new side of Jane Austen. I discovered that Jane didn’t just stay home writing and embroidering but often went to London and stayed with her brother and his wife (their cousin Eliza). They went to the theatre together, they had parties, and she met French aristocrats who’d escaped from the Revolution.
When it was announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new GBP10 note in 2017, few were aware that a GBP10 Austen banknote already existed - issued by her favourite brother. Handsome, clever and enterprising, Henry Austen founded a bank business and charmed his way into the top rank of aristocratic society before going spectacularly bust in the financial crash of 1816. He left an enduring legacy, however, for it was Henry who supported Jane's dream of becoming a published author.Literary critic and cultural historian E. J. Clery presents a radically new vision of the much-loved novelist, revealing how…
Kathryn Sutherland is a professor at Oxford, but that doesn’t mean her writing is dry and dusty. I find her one of the best guides for why Jane Austen is such an enduring success. She’s written a few books about Austen.
I chose this one because it explains where Austen fits in cultural history: what books she read and how she has influenced writers, dramatists, filmmakers, and everyone else ever since. It also tells the story of how her novels came into being, physically–as manuscripts and as printed books.
Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives. offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status…
John Wiltshire brings a perspective to Jane Austen’s novels that is old and new. I am in awe of how he can take a passage from one of her novels and dive deeply into it, finding worlds of meaning in the familiar text. He writes beautifully and eloquently about these hidden depths.
One of the unusual things about Wiltshire as a literary scholar is that he is also an expert on health and psychology. But he doesn’t psycho-analyze Austen or try to diagnose her at a distance: he uses words and phrases and even punctuation in the novels to look beneath the surface of the narrative at the moods and relationships they reveal.
In this major study, leading Austen scholar John Wiltshire offers new interpretations of Jane Austen's six novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). Much recent criticism of Austen has concentrated on the social, historical and intellectual context of her work, but Wiltshire turns attention back to Austen's prose techniques. Arguing that each of Austen's works has its own distinct focus and underlying agenda, he shows how Austen's interest in psychology, and especially her treatment of attention and the various forms of memory, helped shape her narratives. Through a…
My book is about what music meant to Jane Austen as a writer, listener, player, and singer. It’s based on decades of delving into the musical references in her novels, her letters, and her amazing and spiky teenage writing, along with her collection of sheet music, which includes around 160 songs and piano pieces copied in her handwriting,
The book explores the musical links Austen had with her extended family, like the songs her niece remembered her singing long after Austen died. We discover what music tells us about her awareness of current events, what it was like attending the theatre in London in 1813, and all the now-famous composers she’d never heard of.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
