From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure featuring ';your favorite author's favorite authors' (Today)the women who inspired Jane Austenthat's ';a meditation on reading and writing, on honesty and self-discoveryand on what books can teach us, if we let them' (The Washington Post).
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen's books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn't a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writersand clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen's work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn't a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase ';pride and prejudice' came from Frances Burney's second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen's bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn't Romneydespite her trainingever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen's Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen's heroeswomen writers who were erased from the Western canonto reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte
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