Here are 100 books that The Jane Austen Society fans have personally recommended if you like
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Before fan fiction was popular, I would often daydream about the lives of my favorite book characters. Did Jane Eyre gain more confidence from her inheritance? Did Ponyboy find a way to survive his tragic childhood? Decades later, I gravitate toward retellings, often picking them up simply because I like the source material. Still, when I started working on this list, I realized what a daunting task I’d set myself. There are so many! And I haven’t even read two recently lauded titles: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Percival Everett’s James. So hat in my hand, I present these favorites ranging from serious to light-hearted.
I am a sucker for Jane Austen retellings, and this one is my favorite. Kamal’s characters are as vivid as their original inspirations from Pride and Prejudice.
The Pakistani setting also adds a layer of complexity. Even as the novel sweeps charmingly along, moments of social commentary cut through the lightness. Perhaps most satisfying is how Charlotte Lucas, here Sherry Looclus, gets a happier ending.
“This inventive retelling of Pride and Prejudice charms.”—People
“A fun, page-turning romp and a thought-provoking look at the class-obsessed strata of Pakistani society.”—NPR
Alys Binat has sworn never to marry—until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider.
A scandal and vicious rumor concerning the Binat family have destroyed their fortune and prospects for desirable marriages, but Alys, the second and most practical of the five Binat daughters, has found happiness teaching English literature to schoolgirls. Knowing that many of her students won’t make it to graduation before dropping out to marry and have children, Alys…
I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was ten years old, and I loved the book so much that I reread it a few months later. In my teenage years and early twenties, I thought that I was like Elizabeth Bennet—she’s witty and opinionated, goes her own way, and loves to read books and play the pianoforte. As I grew older, I realized that in many ways I'm more like Mary Bennet (social situations can be difficult!). Jane Austen always offers me new insights into my life, and her stories have become a sort of mythology, providing fertile ground from which writers and filmmakers have created their own works.
This is a brilliant book that you will want to read in print—not digitally—because, for every single page of Jane Austen’s classic novel, there is an accompanying page of annotations. This is a great book if you want to dive deeper into Pride and Prejudice. The annotations include pictures of carriages and locations in the novel; historical details that helped me understand property laws, relationships, and societal expectations; definitions and connotations of how words were used in Austen’s time, and much more. It’s written in a very readable style, and you can either read it from start to finish or skip around to your favorite passages.
Product Description This first-ever fully annotated edition of one of the most beloved novels in the world is a sheer delight for Jane Austen fans. Here is the complete text of Pride and Prejudice with more than 2,300 annotations on facing pages, including: Explanations of historical context Rules of etiquette, class differences, the position of women, legal and economic realities, leisure activities, and more. Citations from Austen’s life, letters, and other writings Parallels between the novel and Austen’s experience are revealed, along with writings that illuminate her beliefs and opinions. Definitions and clarifications Archaic words, words still in use whose…
I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was ten years old, and I loved the book so much that I reread it a few months later. In my teenage years and early twenties, I thought that I was like Elizabeth Bennet—she’s witty and opinionated, goes her own way, and loves to read books and play the pianoforte. As I grew older, I realized that in many ways I'm more like Mary Bennet (social situations can be difficult!). Jane Austen always offers me new insights into my life, and her stories have become a sort of mythology, providing fertile ground from which writers and filmmakers have created their own works.
Not only do I love Jane Austen, but I’ve always been a huge fan of both young adult novels and science fiction. This book combines all three interests! This retelling of Persuasionis set in a futuristic science fiction world in which class systems are alive and well and technology is being suppressed. I loved the second-chance romance between Elliot and Kai and the inventive use of the setting to create societal commentary.
It's been several generations since a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the Reduction, decimating humanity and giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.
Elliot North has always known her place in this world. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family's estate over love. Since then the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress, and Elliot's estate is foundering, forcing her to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was ten years old, and I loved the book so much that I reread it a few months later. In my teenage years and early twenties, I thought that I was like Elizabeth Bennet—she’s witty and opinionated, goes her own way, and loves to read books and play the pianoforte. As I grew older, I realized that in many ways I'm more like Mary Bennet (social situations can be difficult!). Jane Austen always offers me new insights into my life, and her stories have become a sort of mythology, providing fertile ground from which writers and filmmakers have created their own works.
This is the published script for a play that I desperately want to see if it’s ever performed near me. Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) retells Pride and Prejudicefrom the perspective of the servants, who don costumes to act out the scenes of the story, sing karaoke to modern music, and provide hilarious and sometimes ruthless commentary on the characters, their relationship, and what it all means. While sometimes irreverent, the play manages to be both parody and homage to this great novel.
'Love's irrelevant - we're talking about marriage.'
This unique take on Jane Austen's beloved novel is an adaptation like no other, drawing on over two hundred years of romantic pop history, and featuring six young women with a story to tell.
You might have seen them before, emptying the chamber pots and sweeping ash from the grate; the overlooked and the undervalued making sure those above stairs find their happy ending.
Of course, these women have always been running the show - after all, 'You can't have a whirlwind romance without clean bedding' - but now the servants are also…
All my life I loved her novels and often reread them, but in secret. My friends—in the 1960s—scoffed at her plots. When I began my career as a classicist, I went on rereading her novels when I should've been reading academic articles. Then by a stroke of luck, I ran across a sentence in one of her letters that alluded to an obscure area of classical literature. This changed reading her novels from a guilty pleasure to scholarly research. I questioned why she and members of her family concealed her learning. The reason shocked me. The people of her day believed that women who knew Latin and Greek were sexually frigid, sexually promiscuous, man-crazy lesbians.
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.
Alice is an eighteen-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own neice, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.
I've been book-besotted my entire life. I've read, studied, taught, reviewed, and written books. I went to “gradual” school, as John Irving calls it, earning a PhD in literature before gradually realizing that what I really loved was writing. For me, books contain the intellectual challenge of puzzles, the fun of entertainment, the ability to fill souls. They have changed my life, and the best compliments I have received are from readers who say my books have changed theirs. I read widely and indiscriminately (as this list shows) because I believe that good books are found in all genres. But a book about books? What a glorious meta-adventure.
Natalie Jenner sets her story of post-World War II feminism in a bookstore in England.
Three women, each of whom has proved their worth during the war years, must now face the fact that men are taking the reins once again. And yet, as Jenner makes clear, it is the women who have the intelligence, the ideas, and the skills to make this stagnant bookshop a vibrant and thriving place.
Jenner has done her research, and I love the way the setting and characters come alive, as do some real-life literary characters (always wonderful when that works). It's never a question that things will change at the shop—but how that happens makes for a delightful and satisfying read.
*Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Katie Couric Media, the CBC, the Globe and Mail, BookBub, POPSUGAR, SheReads, Women.com and more!*
Natalie Jenner, the internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world in Bloomsbury Girls.
Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one rules.…
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
I am grateful to my maternal grandparents, immigrants from southern Italy, who instilled in me a love for the Bel Paese that has inspired me all my life. I began to travel to Italy 45 years ago, and after writing for television—on the staff of Everybody Loves Raymond—I turned to travel writing. I’ve written 4 books about Italian travel, along with many stories for magazines. I also design and host Golden Weeks in Italy: For Women Only tours, to give female travelers an insider’s experience of this extraordinary country.
I have always loved visiting the city of Naples – for the great food, the rich history, and the warm locals who remind me of my southern Italian relatives. Ferrante’s novels go deep into the complexities of a female friendship that spans many decades, while also bringing to life a wide range of characters who I grew to love and truly care about, while devouring this extraordinary series.
The complete four-volume boxed set of the New York Times–bestselling epic about hardship and female friendship in postwar Naples that has sold over five million copies.
Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante follow Elena and Lila, from their rough-edged upbringing in Naples, Italy, not long after WWII, through the many stages of their lives―and along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse.
This volume includes all four novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story of…
I was brought up in Maidenhead in Berkshire, a town on the River Thames to the west of London. After studying archaeology at University College, Cardiff, I worked for many years as a field archaeologist. I met my wife, Lesley, on an excavation at Milton Keynes, and we have worked together ever since, both in archaeology and as authors of archaeology and history books. It was only after studying the Napoleonic period, which was when Jane Austen lived and wrote, that I understood the context of her novels and came to a much deeper appreciation of them.
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.
This book is the outcome of years of research in Austen archives, and stems from the original family biography by W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: her Life and Letters. Jane Austen, A Family Record was first published in 1989, and this edition incorporates information that has come to light since then, and provides new illustrations and updated family trees. Le Faye gives a detailed account of Austen's life and literary career. She has collected together documented facts as well as the traditions concerning the novelist, and places her within the context of a widespread, affectionate and talented family…
I was brought up in Maidenhead in Berkshire, a town on the River Thames to the west of London. After studying archaeology at University College, Cardiff, I worked for many years as a field archaeologist. I met my wife, Lesley, on an excavation at Milton Keynes, and we have worked together ever since, both in archaeology and as authors of archaeology and history books. It was only after studying the Napoleonic period, which was when Jane Austen lived and wrote, that I understood the context of her novels and came to a much deeper appreciation of them.
There are many biographies and other narratives of Jane Austen, with many published since 1997, when Professor Park Honan updated his original book. Even so, his biography is still, in my opinion, the best. It is comprehensive, detailed, and accurate, with copious endnotes. The author also had unparalleled help from descendants of Jane Austen. His writing style is straightforward, and he is excellent at depicting the overall context of her life and how it influenced her writing, from her two brothers in the Royal Navy to productions in the London theatres.
Park Honan's landmark biography of Jane Austen has been lavished with praise since its original publication. Written in an accessable atyle and meticulously researched, this book combones intanacy with Austen as a child and a woman.
Desperate to honor his father’s dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm. Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and…
I’m a writer of traditional Regency romances who would be happy to let everyone fight over Mr. Darcy while I sneak off with Captain Wentworth. If period dramas are dress-up for grown-ups, the best historical fiction is nothing less than a trip in a time machine, no Dramamine required. So if you’ve ever dreamed of being knocked over the head and waking up in a Jane Austen novel, you’re not alone. Come join me in one of my Regencies. I’ll save you a glass of ratafia.
Technically speaking, this isn’t historical fiction because, when Trollope wrote it, it was contemporary(Victorian) fiction. But if you love Austen adaptations or anything set in later periods where people wore fancy, constrictive clothing, this book is for you. Barchester is a cathedral town getting a new bishop, and, oh, man, is everyone in a tizzy. Every cleric is angling for a promotion, simultaneously falling at the feet of the exotic Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni while refusing to bow the knee to the new powers that be. And if you have a soft spot for henpecked husbands, Trollope wrote one for the ages, with wife Mrs. Proudie stealing every scene. For my money, with his keen eye and wicked humor, Trollope is the true heir to Jane Austen.
Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers - struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect - actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other guises, led to civil war and constitutional upheaval.
That awareness heightens the comedy and intensifies the drama in this magnificent novel and it transforms the story of a fight for ascendency among the clergy and dependants of a great English cathedral into something fundamental and universal. Barchester Towers is the second of Trollope's six Barchester…
