Here are 100 books that Jane Austen's Names fans have personally recommended if you like Jane Austen's Names. Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

Kathleen E. Akers Author Of Law and Economics in Jane Austen

From my list on love, law, and money.

Why am I passionate about this?

The fundamental connection between law and economics rules most of the world. This is especially true in romantic relationships, whether the parties realize it or not. Being “Janites” ourselves, in addition to our day jobs of family law professor and economic consultant, we could not help but read Jane Austen and be blown away by her genius understanding of both law and economics. Moreover, the principles she draws out that govern much of her characters’ decision-making are just as applicable today in the world of online dating and Tinder. We hope our book enlightens you on law and economics in new, surprising, and romantic ways.

Kathleen's book list on love, law, and money

Kathleen E. Akers Why Kathleen loves this book

The world is driven by incentives. Much of economics is not obscure theory but practically understanding how incentives affect decision-making.

Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics provides a solid foundation for understanding how our lives revolve around economics and why understanding economic principles is critically important for evaluating the social and geopolitical world around us. 

This book was important in our analysis of Jane Austen’s work, as her use of economic principles in romance is what causes her work to be loved for centuries.

By Charles Wheelan ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Naked Economics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is a new edition of the best-selling economics book that won't put you to sleep. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favourite of students and general readers includes commentary on hot topics such as automation, trade and income inequality. Ten years after the financial crisis, Naked Economics examines how policymakers managed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.


If you love Jane Austen's Names...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

Book cover of Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family

Kathleen E. Akers Author Of Law and Economics in Jane Austen

From my list on love, law, and money.

Why am I passionate about this?

The fundamental connection between law and economics rules most of the world. This is especially true in romantic relationships, whether the parties realize it or not. Being “Janites” ourselves, in addition to our day jobs of family law professor and economic consultant, we could not help but read Jane Austen and be blown away by her genius understanding of both law and economics. Moreover, the principles she draws out that govern much of her characters’ decision-making are just as applicable today in the world of online dating and Tinder. We hope our book enlightens you on law and economics in new, surprising, and romantic ways.

Kathleen's book list on love, law, and money

Kathleen E. Akers Why Kathleen loves this book

In Marriage Markets, June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, both law professors like Lynne Marie Kohm, examine how macroeconomic forces are transforming our most intimate and important spheres, and how working-class and lower-income families have paid the highest price.

Their book shows how the best-educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working-class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability because greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets.

The failure to see marriage as a market affected by supply and demand has obscured any meaningful analysis of the way that societal changes influence culture. But Jane Austen understood this principle very well.

By June Carbone , Naomi Cahn ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marriage Markets as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Over the past four decades, the American family has undergone a radical transformation. Skyrocketing rates of divorce, single parenthood, and couples with children out of wedlock have all worked to undermine an idealized family model that took root in the 1950s and has served as a beacon for traditionalists ever since. But what are the causes of this change? Conservatives blame it on moral decline and women's liberation. Progressives often attribute it to women's
greater freedom and changing sexual mores, but they typically paint these trends in a positive light. In Family Classes, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone contend that…


Book cover of The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce

Kathleen E. Akers Author Of Law and Economics in Jane Austen

From my list on love, law, and money.

Why am I passionate about this?

The fundamental connection between law and economics rules most of the world. This is especially true in romantic relationships, whether the parties realize it or not. Being “Janites” ourselves, in addition to our day jobs of family law professor and economic consultant, we could not help but read Jane Austen and be blown away by her genius understanding of both law and economics. Moreover, the principles she draws out that govern much of her characters’ decision-making are just as applicable today in the world of online dating and Tinder. We hope our book enlightens you on law and economics in new, surprising, and romantic ways.

Kathleen's book list on love, law, and money

Kathleen E. Akers Why Kathleen loves this book

The key role of "incentives" in family law is considered in this economic approach to family law.

The book discusses the possible adverse consequences emanating from faulty legal design, while demonstrating that good family law should provide incentives for consistent and honest behavior.

Economists, specialists in the economic analysis of law, and academic lawyers discuss recent advances in specialized studies of marriage, cohabitation, and divorce.

This work is of considerable interest to lawyers, policy-makers, and economists concerned with family law.

By Antony W. Dnes (editor) , Robert Rowthorn (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What sort of contract is marriage? What does it offer the parties? What are the difficulties of enforcement, and the result of failed effective enforcement? This book takes an economic approach to marriage and divorce, considering the key role of 'incentives' in family law: it highlights the possible adverse consequences emanating from faulty legal design, while demonstrating that good family law should provide incentives for consistent and honest behavior. Economists, specialists in the economic analysis of law, and academic lawyers discuss recent advances in specialist work on marriage, cohabitation, and divorce. Chapters are grouped around four topics: the contractual perspectives…


If you love Margaret Doody...

Book cover of Coyote Weather

Coyote Weather by Amanda Cockrell,

Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.

Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…

Book cover of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

Kathleen E. Akers Author Of Law and Economics in Jane Austen

From my list on love, law, and money.

Why am I passionate about this?

The fundamental connection between law and economics rules most of the world. This is especially true in romantic relationships, whether the parties realize it or not. Being “Janites” ourselves, in addition to our day jobs of family law professor and economic consultant, we could not help but read Jane Austen and be blown away by her genius understanding of both law and economics. Moreover, the principles she draws out that govern much of her characters’ decision-making are just as applicable today in the world of online dating and Tinder. We hope our book enlightens you on law and economics in new, surprising, and romantic ways.

Kathleen's book list on love, law, and money

Kathleen E. Akers Why Kathleen loves this book

Offering a great deal of historical data and analysis, this book does what most Jane Austen books do – give the Janeite reader lots of food for thought in every direction. 

It edits several essays about a wide variety of topics, including class, economics, gender, and the screen adaptations of Jane’s works. It targets an academic audience but is also engaging for any reader looking to dig deeper into Jane.

By Edward Copeland (editor) , Juliet McMaster (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jane Austen's stock in the popular marketplace has never been higher, while academic studies continue to uncover new aspects of her engagement with her world. This fully updated edition of the acclaimed Cambridge Companion offers clear, accessible coverage of the intricacies of Austen's works in their historical context, with biographical information and suggestions for further reading. Major scholars address Austen's six novels, the letters and other works, in terms accessible to students and the many general readers, as well as to academics. With seven new essays, the Companion now covers topics that have become central to recent Austen studies, for…


Book cover of A Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family

Janine Barchas Author Of The Novel Life of Jane Austen

From my list on Jane Austen 250th birthday.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Janine's book list on Jane Austen 250th birthday

Janine Barchas Why Janine loves this book

Effectively, this is a meticulous stalker’s record of Jane Austen’s family, listing what everyone was doing (and where) for every single day of her life.

I know of nothing quite like this biographical resource (for any writer). Admittedly, the book is more like an Excel spreadsheet than a narrative—and something I’ve only gratefully consulted rather than read straight through from end to end. But for hardcore Janeites, this day-by-day listing of events in her life is indispensable.  

By Deirdre Le Faye ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For more than thirty years Deirdre Le Faye, one of the world's leading authorities on Jane Austen, has been gathering and organising every single piece of information available about the Austen family before, during and after Jane's lifetime. Her unique chronology, containing some ten thousand entries, is now available in paperback. For the first time, those interested in Jane Austen can discover where she was and what she was doing at many precise moments of her life. The entries, many taken from hitherto unexplored and unpublished documents, are presented in a clear and readable form and each item of information…


Book cover of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen

Gillian Dooley Author Of She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music

From my list on reveal the real Jane Austen.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Gillian's book list on reveal the real Jane Austen

Gillian Dooley Why Gillian loves this book

I love every one of Jane Austen’s novels. I have no favorites, so I can’t recommend only one. They are so funny, but they’re also full of life, love, sadness, loss, families, friends, disappointments, and surprises.

They all end in a marriage, but so do Shakespeare’s comedies–it’s just what happens in a comedy, along with many other things. I’ve read them all more times than I can count but I always find something new to love every time I reread any of them.

By Jane Austen ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Complete Novels of Jane Austen as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jane Austen revolutionized the literary romance, using it as a platform from which to address issues of gender politics and class consciousness among the British middle-class of the late eighteenth century. The novels included in this collection from the elegant Knickerbocker Classics series-Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan-represent all of Austen's complete novels, and provide the reader with an entrance into the world she and her memorable characters inhabited.

With witty, unflinching morality, Austen portrays English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close and the nineteenth century began.…


If you love Jane Austen's Names...

Book cover of Temple of Dreams: A Novel of Now and Then

Temple of Dreams by Carolyn Mathews,

Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…

Book cover of Austen at Sea

Janine Barchas Author Of The Novel Life of Jane Austen

From my list on Jane Austen 250th birthday.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Janine's book list on Jane Austen 250th birthday

Janine Barchas Why Janine loves this book

I like fan fiction that respects the boundaries of established fact, which is why I adore both this one and the next—each of which imagines an utterly compelling story between the lines of bare biographical facts. Reading this was like getting a chance to meet some of Austen’s family members and early readers.

Jane Austen’s seafaring brother Frank was her longest-lived sibling, and he eventually rose in the navy to the post of Admiral. Like Cassandra, Frank lived long enough to witness a sea-change (excuse the pun) in his sister’s reputation as a novelist. Exciting stuff for Janeites! If anyone wants to make a movie out of this one, I also have strong casting preferences!  

By Natalie Jenner ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Austen at Sea as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Two pairs of siblings, devotees of Jane Austen, find their lives transformed by a visit to England and Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother and keeper of a long-suppressed, secret legacy.

In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come…


Book cover of Northanger Abbey

Lauren Owen Author Of Small Angels

From my list on books to read in a haunted house.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries. 

Lauren's book list on books to read in a haunted house

Lauren Owen Why Lauren loves this book

This book parodies the gothic novels popular in Jane Austen’s time. Ann Radcliffe, whose novel Udolpho features prominently, was the queen of this genre. Her stories boast chilling elements like murder plots, the Spanish Inquisition, skeletons, evil nuns, and more.

The heroine of this book, Catherine Morland, enjoys this kind of writing a bit too much; mistaking real life for fiction leads her to see murder and intrigue where there is none. It’s a good warning for us imaginative types not to let fantasy run away with us. (There’s no harm in enjoying a spooky tale within reason, though; Henry Tilney, the novel’s level-headed hero, has read Udolpho and thoroughly enjoyed it.) 

By Jane Austen , Keith Carabine (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Northanger Abbey as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent.

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.

In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined…


Book cover of John Keats

Willard Spiegelman Author Of Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

From my list on the lives and works of English and American poets.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.

Willard's book list on the lives and works of English and American poets

Willard Spiegelman Why Willard loves this book

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.

By Walter Jackson Bate ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked John Keats as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is…


If you love Margaret Doody...

Book cover of Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney,

When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…

Book cover of Jane Austen: Her Life: The Definitive Portrait of Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Art, Her Family, Her World

Roy Adkins Author Of Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England: How Our Ancestors Lived Two Centuries Ago

From my list on Jane Austen.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Roy's book list on Jane Austen

Roy Adkins Why Roy loves this book

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.

By Park Honan ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Jane Austen as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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.


Book cover of Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
Book cover of Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family
Book cover of The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce

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