100 books like What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

I love this book not just because of its enduring importance - Woolf remains a towering feminist figure - but because of its vivid, imaginative writing.

Based on lectures given to female students at Cambridge, Woolf’s essay argues powerfully for the intellectual independence of women. Such independence, she reasons, must first be materially possible, hence the female writer’s need for that famous "room of one’s own."

To exemplify this, Woolf imagines a certain Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s equally talented sister: would she not be incapable of achieving the same success as her brother owing to the patriarchal structures of society? In our post-Me Too world a century later, the question remains vital.

Gilbert and Gubar take the reader on an exhilarating ride through women’s literature from Jane Austen to Emily Dickinson. Women writers freed female characters from their stereotypes in novels written by men—angels and monsters, dull virgins, and evil temptresses—to become friends, or people I would choose for friends if only they were real. The book’s title alludes to the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre, a haunting specter of the thwarted woman author raging at her bars.

Figes argues that although women novelists did not directly challenge the rules of a patriarchal society, they challenged its assumptions by protesting the restrictions on women’s lives and severely criticizing the clergymen, enablers of the patriarchy. My favorite section of the book is her interpretation of the Gothic novels, which she calls the female equivalent of picaresque novels. Women, she points out, were not permitted to roam the world like Tom Jones, having adventures. Instead, these novels presented women, who, through no fault of their own, are imprisoned by evil men. Their adventures, as they find their way to safety in foreign lands, prove their courage and intelligence.

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.

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. 

This was a modern-day retelling of Persuasion. I’ll admit, Persuasion has long been my least favorite Jane Austen novel. But Staci Hart finally made me fall in love with it. The story is told in first person, alternating between the perspectives of the hero and heroine, which made me feel that I was given a glimpse into their minds and hearts, something that the original novel failed to do. The added complication of the hero’s father being terminally ill really added depth and emotion to the story. I was completely wrecked—in the best way, of course!—by the end of this book. Read it with a box of tissues!

I love Jane Austen’s novels – the fine detail with which she paints characters based on everyday life, as she described it in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh: “… the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour...” Sadly, Austen died at age 41, in the prime of her life, and the peak of her writing skills. Her last novel was unfinished. Most biographers surmise that she died of Addison’s disease – an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the patient’s adrenal glands, slowly sapping their energy for lack of the stress hormone cortisol. Ironically, the illness can be brought on or exacerbated by chronic stress, which certainly towards the end of her life Jane Austen experienced in spades.

When her father died, Jane Austen, being a woman, did not… show more.

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.

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.

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.