Here are 100 books that Jane Austen fans have personally recommended if you like
Jane Austen.
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Jane Austen now dominates my teaching and research. This was not always so. I was trained in the writers that came before Austen and was happily teaching classes on them when someone at my university asked me to teach a class on Jane Austen. At first, I refused to switch. I countered, “She does not need yet another class.” But I agreed, and soon, I was hooked on her humor and her deft responses to those earlier writers. While the new graphic novel is my third book about Jane, I have not exhausted the things to research! The more I know, the more I admire her writings and her life.
I relish the intimacy of reading Austen’s private letters, and this is the best and most complete edition. Although her sister Cassandra notoriously burned many of her letters, the 160-or-so that survive offer plenty of unguarded moments to satisfy curiosity about her daily life.
In fact, I think Austen’s best lines are not from her novels but from her letters to Cassandra. For example, on the fashion for decorating bonnets, she quips “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.” And in a note about their garden: “I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.”
Jane Austen's letters afford a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative, they bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events with a freshness unparalleled in biography. Above all we recognize the unmistakable voice of the author of Pride and Prejudice, witty and amusing as she describes the social life of town and country, thoughtful and constructive when writing about the business of literary composition.
R. W. Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the collected Letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. A third edition,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
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.
Nowadays, Jane Austen’s novels look superficially like historical romances, but she actually wrote contemporary novels for a contemporary audience, and they are much more complicated and subtle than they first appear. This book explains many of the mentions of people, places, and events in her novels that were obvious to her readers, but which are far from obvious now.
In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen's novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen's fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online. According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity…
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.
Martha Lloyd was a close friend of Jane Austen and a relative by marriage. She lived with the Austen family at Chawton in Hampshire when Jane was there with her mother and sister, and much later Martha married Jane’s widowed brother, Francis. Her household book shows us the recipes and homemade medical remedies that they used at that time. This book has a facsimile of the original manuscript, along with various notes, as well as a section on Martha Lloyd that is the best available summary of her life.
This is the first facsimile publication of 'Martha Lloyd's Household Book', the manuscript cookbook of Jane Austen's closest friend. Martha's notebook is reproduced in a colour facsimile section with complete transcription and detailed annotation. Introductory chapters discuss its place among other household books of the eighteenth century.
Martha Lloyd befriended a young Jane Austen and later lived with Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother at the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane wrote or revised her novels. Martha later married into the Austen family. Her collection features recipes and remedies handwritten during a period of over thirty years and…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
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.
When I was a little girl, my parents bought me a children’s edition of Pride and Prejudice. Ever since, I have loved Jane Austen’s works. As I grew older, I really enjoyed learning about her, and researching the history of her times. I hope you will enjoy reading these books as much as I did!
Hundreds (possibly thousands) of biographies of Austen have been written, but Tomalin’s work has long been a favourite of mine.
Her sympathetic portrait of Jane digs deep into her early family life, schooldays, literary influences, and early authorship. Jane’s relationship with her mother; her family’s encouragement of her writings; the fear of poverty after her father’s death; the disastrous (rejected) marriage proposal, and her literary legacy are all detailed with warmth and energy.
The novels of Jane Austen depict a world of civility, reassuring stability and continuity, which generations of readers have supposed was the world she herself inhabited. Claire Tomalin's biography paints a surprisingly different picture of the Austen family and their Hampshire neighbours, and of Jane's progress through a difficult childhood, an unhappy love affair, her experiences as a poor relation and her decision to reject a marriage that would solve all her problems - except that of continuing as a writer. Both the woman and the novels are radically reassessed in this biography.
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.
Jane Austen wrote and revised most of her novels in a cottage lent to her by her brother in Chawton, England. This book is a fictional account of a group of individuals in post-World War II Chawton who are all lost—or have experienced great loss. They band together in an attempt to save Jane Austen’s home from destruction. I loved getting to experience the story from each of the character’s perspectives, and the author’s prose is delightful. This novel is a testament to how people from all walks of life have been changed by Jane Austen, and how reading Jane Austen can save us.
'A wonderful book, a wonderful read' Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club
Only a few months after the end of the Second World War, a new battle is beginning in the little village of Chawton. Once the final home of Jane Austen, the Chawton estate is dwindling, and the last piece of Austen's heritage is at risk of being sold to the highest bidder...
Drawn together by their love of her novels, eight very different people - from a local farmer to a glamorous film star - must unite to attempt something…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I stumbled across Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when I was twelve years old and fell in love with her humorous, witty writing and quirky characters. I saved my allowance and bought an omnibus of her complete works, but it wasn’t enough: I was hooked and wanted to read more books like hers. A decade later, I started to write books like hers, and my first Regency-set romantic comedy was published in 2001. The movie Mr. Malcolm’s List, based on my novel, was released in theaters in 2022, and I had the pleasure of hearing people laughing as they watched it, as I had so often laughed while reading Austen’s work.
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.
I love Jane Austen’s novels. I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14, but it’s far too long ago to remember when I first read the others, and I’ve now read them all many times. I’ve also always been a singer, and I learned the piano when I was young, so I immediately noticed the music in the novels. I started writing about it seriously in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that her music collection was still around and started making concert programs out of it. The new book brings all these things together.
John Wiltshire brings a perspective to Jane Austen’s novels that is old and new. I am in awe of how he can take a passage from one of her novels and dive deeply into it, finding worlds of meaning in the familiar text. He writes beautifully and eloquently about these hidden depths.
One of the unusual things about Wiltshire as a literary scholar is that he is also an expert on health and psychology. But he doesn’t psycho-analyze Austen or try to diagnose her at a distance: he uses words and phrases and even punctuation in the novels to look beneath the surface of the narrative at the moods and relationships they reveal.
In this major study, leading Austen scholar John Wiltshire offers new interpretations of Jane Austen's six novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). Much recent criticism of Austen has concentrated on the social, historical and intellectual context of her work, but Wiltshire turns attention back to Austen's prose techniques. Arguing that each of Austen's works has its own distinct focus and underlying agenda, he shows how Austen's interest in psychology, and especially her treatment of attention and the various forms of memory, helped shape her narratives. Through a…
I’m an author and a college writing professor with an MFA in Creative Writing. Additionally, I am involved in and teach other art forms and the humanities including music, film, and literature. I enjoy researching and writing about literary figures, musicians, and other creatives, all of which have been a focus in my children’s books.
A luminous portrait of Jane Austen chocked full of spirited text and shimmery illustrations that capture the times. The story highlights the beginnings of Austen’s great career as a novelist from her youngest days all the way to famous writer. It’s a great addition to any classroom or library. Like Jane Taylor before her, Austen’s success paved the way for women authors to come.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of our greatest writers.
But before that, she was just an ordinary girl.
In fact, young Jane was a bit quiet and shy; if you had met her back then, you might not have noticed her at all. But she would have noticed you. Jane watched and listened to all the things people around her did and said and locked those observations away for safekeeping.
Jane also loved to read. She devoured everything in her father's massive library, and before long she began creating her own stories. In her…
I stumbled across Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when I was twelve years old and fell in love with her humorous, witty writing and quirky characters. I saved my allowance and bought an omnibus of her complete works, but it wasn’t enough: I was hooked and wanted to read more books like hers. A decade later, I started to write books like hers, and my first Regency-set romantic comedy was published in 2001. The movie Mr. Malcolm’s List, based on my novel, was released in theaters in 2022, and I had the pleasure of hearing people laughing as they watched it, as I had so often laughed while reading Austen’s work.
P.G. Wodehouse is a comic genius best known for his series of books featuring Wooster and Jeeves, but this book differs from his usual fare in that it has a female protagonist and a sweet little romance.
I loved Jill, who is the type of heroine Jane Austen might have invented: loyal, spunky, and highly principled. Jill’s adventures take us from London to 1920s New York, but this isn’t historical fiction. Like Austen’s books, this is a contemporary novel written in the era in which the author lived.
I love Austen because of her wry humor and her feisty female characters, two things that are also present in this very fun book.
P.G. Wodehouse's classic tale (originally published under the title "The Little Warrior") of Jill Mariner, a wealthy young woman engaged to Sir Derek Underhill. Following financial disaster, Jill's life takes several adventurous turns with schemes, relatives, chorus girls, and the search for love.
