While next year’s Jane Austen Summer Program will focus on Claire Tomalin’s biography of our favorite author, there are several others you can check out. Here is a small selection to get you going.
‘Jane Austen: The Secret Radical’ by Helena Kelly
This is less a history of Jane Austen’s life and more of a feminist reading of Austen’s works. Each chapter focuses on one of Austen’s novels, and Kelly helps put into historical context each one of them. We think we know them like the back of our hands, but how much are we missing that Austen’s contemporary audience would have picked up immediately? While some of Kelly’s arguments seem a bit tenuous or even downright far-fetched, “The Secret Radical” helps modern audiences fill that knowledge gap. John Sutherland, who co-wrote “So You Think You Know Jane Austen?” with Deirdre LeFaye, wrote in the New York Times: “‘Jane Austen: The Secret Radical’ sets out to raise hackles …
But, taking a deep breath, I concede that it is, stripped of its flights of fancy, an important revisionary work for 2017.”
‘The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things’ by Paula Byrne
Byrne’s exquisite biography of Austen eschews a linear format in favor of themes and objects: sisterhood, vellum notebooks in which Austen copied her juvenilia, a laptop desk, topaz crosses, and more. NPR described this book as “a dynamic new biography in which Austen lives and breathes,” and it’s hard not to fall in love with the author through this “vivacious, surprising” book.
‘Jane Austen at Home’ by Lucy Worsley
Alexandra Mullen writes in the Hudson Review: “Worsley … exuberantly connects the work to the life against the background of the age” and “uses her sprightly energy to pull together a lot of fascinating detailed scholarship.”
All books are available on Amazon.com. Support JASP through smile.amazon.com.
