100 books like Old Times

In Shannon Winslow’s Regency retelling of Pride and Prejudice, we finally get to experience the story from Darcy’s perspective. The story closely follows the original novel, but with some added scenes that fill in the gaps during the time when Darcy is apart from Elizabeth. Ms. Winslow cleverly added an original character as a rival love interest for Darcy. I enjoyed seeing a totally different side to Austen’s most famous novel and witnessing Darcy’s character growth as he struggles to overcome his own pride and prejudice and find true love.

I’ve dipped into books about writing, storytelling, and scriptwriting before, and I’ve always found them to be utterly uninspiring, and in fact quite depressing – little more than a set of formulas to ensure your story’s structure is like other stories.

But Will Storr’s excellent book uses insights from evolutionary biology and psychology to help you get to understand why human minds love stories, and what it is about great stories that keeps readers turning the pages. His advice is powerful, simple – primal, even.

I’ve used this excellent book to help improve my writing and ensure my first book was a real page-turner. But The Science of Storytelling has also left a huge mark on me in terms of thinking about how and why we communicate. It’s for our own survival, after all. 

Clare Darcy’s books were published in the 1970s, and she was billed as the “best Regency novelist since Georgette Heyer,” which was probably an accurate statement at the time–and might still be. I do enjoy her funny, witty Regency novels, and this one, with its ensemble cast of unique characters, is a particular favorite. 

Keats, beloved of English majors and ordinary readers everywhere, died at 25.

No other writer – not Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, George Eliot, Jane Austen – would be remembered today if he or she had died at that age.

W.J. Bate was a magisterial Harvard scholar. His two sympathetic biographies, of Keats, and of Samuel Johnson, both won Pulitzer prizes and are still readable and important. They breathe life into their subjects and deeply humanize them.

You will weep with sympathy and understanding.

A best-selling novelist explains to a fictional niece why, under the shadow of the nuclear bomb we should bother with stuff written before the twentieth century, particularly with the romances of an old maid who never went anywhere. A skilled novelist herself, Weldon vividly depicts the horrors of Austen’s world that equal those of our age—famine, war, childbirth, and medical ignorance. Because she is a novelist, she is good at describing Austen’s mastery of turning social household irritations into art. As a special bonus, she recommends other novelists for readers to enjoy and aspiring novelists to learn from.

Ennui is a hidden gem of a novel. I admire the way it deftly weaves together personal lives and political histories on either side of the Irish Sea. I have come to feel strongly that the author, Maria Edgeworth, is unjustly overlooked by literary history in favour of Jane Austen. Yet Austen drew inspiration from her older contemporary. In this novel, Edgeworth draws on French words and ideas to tell the tale of an over-entitled English lounge lizard who is cured of his fashionable affliction—the ennui of the title—by his travels and travails in Ireland. The result is a cosmopolitan novel crackling with invention and implication.

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. 

Although we have some of Jane Austen’s letters and other writing, besides her novels, many more letters have been lost, and relatively little is known about her life. In 1913, nearly a century after her death, William and Richard Austen-Leigh (descendants of her brother James) published what was then known in a book called Life and Letters of Jane Austen. Much more material has been accumulated since, and in 1989 the work was extensively enlarged and revised by Deirdre Le Faye. It is essential reading for those who want to find out about Jane Austen’s life.

Jane Austen is known mainly from her novels, but her surviving letters provide a wonderful insight into her life and character. Most of them were written to her sister, Cassandra, whenever they were separated. This edition, by Deirdre Le Faye, is the most complete and accurate collection of the known letters, and it also includes invaluable notes on what she wrote and the people who were mentioned.

Jane Austen was a clergyman’s daughter, and two of her brothers were clergymen. Her novels abound with clerical characters like the snobby Mr. Elton (Emma) and awkward Mr. Collins (Pride and Prejudice).

This lively book is essential for understanding how the life of a country parish and its resident clergy inspired Jane’s writing and impacted on her daily life. Her father’s and brother’s livings depended on a system of patronage; the value of such livings determined whether a clergyman was an eligible match or as poor as the proverbial church mouse.

Collins illustrates the background to Austen’s life with stories from the lives of contemporary clergymen like Parson James Woodforde.