Here are 100 books that The Complete Novels of Jane Austen fans have personally recommended if you like
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
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.
This book tells us more about what Jane Austen looked like in real life than any drawing does. I love how Hilary Davidson delves into every possible piece of evidence for what she wore and provides illustrations from contemporary drawings and actual bits of clothing that survive.
Some of them actually belonged to Austen–like her turquoise ring and topaz cross, her lace shawl, and her brown silk pelisse. How amazing is it to see these items that Austen herself wore and to see the evidence that she was over 5 foot 6 inches tall!
Hilary Davidson delves into the clothing of one of the world's great authors, providing unique and intimate insight into her everyday life and material world
What did Jane Austen wear?
Acclaimed dress historian and Austen expert Hilary Davidson reveals, for the first time, the wardrobe of one of the world's most celebrated authors. Despite her acknowledged brilliance on the page, Jane Austen has all too often been accused of dowdiness in her appearance. Drawing on Austen's 161 known letters, as well as her own surviving garments and accessories, this book assembles examples of the variety of clothes she…
Readers describe Krenik's writing style as “fast-paced, engaging, making complex plotlines easy to follow.”
Set in a dystopian world where dragons exist, this series offers readers layers of mysteries to unfold. Romance flares between a viscount and the nanny of his five-year-old twins. But not everyone is as they seem,…
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.
There are more comprehensive biographies of Jane Austen, but I love this one, which charts the relationship between Jane and her favorite brother, Henry. He was a banker for a while but also a soldier and became an Anglican minister.
E.J. Clery has done tons of research but she also writes beautifully and brings it all together into a moving and fascinating story that shows a new side of Jane Austen. I discovered that Jane didn’t just stay home writing and embroidering but often went to London and stayed with her brother and his wife (their cousin Eliza). They went to the theatre together, they had parties, and she met French aristocrats who’d escaped from the Revolution.
When it was announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new GBP10 note in 2017, few were aware that a GBP10 Austen banknote already existed - issued by her favourite brother. Handsome, clever and enterprising, Henry Austen founded a bank business and charmed his way into the top rank of aristocratic society before going spectacularly bust in the financial crash of 1816. He left an enduring legacy, however, for it was Henry who supported Jane's dream of becoming a published author.Literary critic and cultural historian E. J. Clery presents a radically new vision of the much-loved novelist, revealing how…
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.
Kathryn Sutherland is a professor at Oxford, but that doesn’t mean her writing is dry and dusty. I find her one of the best guides for why Jane Austen is such an enduring success. She’s written a few books about Austen.
I chose this one because it explains where Austen fits in cultural history: what books she read and how she has influenced writers, dramatists, filmmakers, and everyone else ever since. It also tells the story of how her novels came into being, physically–as manuscripts and as printed books.
Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives. offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status…
What if Elizabeth Bennet’s seemingly perfect elder sister, Jane, hid a heart of selfishness and narcissism beneath her angelic exterior?
Elizabeth Bennet has spent her life in the shadow of her elder sister, Jane. Praised across Hertfordshire for her beauty and kindness, Jane has always seemed the embodiment of perfection.…
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 was fortunate enough to meet my husband over 17 years ago, and we have packed a lot of life in since then. Along with two kids and a dog, we’ve had our fair share of tough moments: financial challenges, bereavement, family issues, marital disagreement, and traumatic life events that taught me just as much as my two decades-long career as a relationship psychotherapist has. This, combined with working with individuals, couples, and partners in search of what love means and how to practically go about achieving it, has clarified for me just how much we all need tools and teachings when it comes to matters of the heart.
Jane Austen would have made such a great therapist! Her razor-sharp observations, combined with profound insights into people and relationships, make this book an all-time favorite of mine. I love her descriptions of falling in (and out of) love and how fallible each of her characters is, reminding us of our humanity–especially when it comes to matters of the heart.
What also strikes me is how true it is that pride, image, and status can still play out in our more modern relationships today. This book feels very old-fashioned in places, but it warns us how easily we can hurt other people and damage relationships, sometimes irrevocably. There’s a lot to learn from Emma, and I enjoy seeing relationships depicted in fiction, where so much can be explored through a fascinating and absorbing story, too.
'Her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility' Robert McCrum, Observer
Although described by Jane Austen as a character 'whom no one but myself will much like', the irrepressible Emma Woodhouse is one of her most beloved heroines. Clever, rich and beautiful, she sees no need for marriage, but loves interfering in the romantic lives of others, until her matchmaking plans unravel, with consequences that she never expected. Jane Austen's novel of youthful exuberance and gradual self-knowledge is a brilliant, sparkling comic masterpiece.
I am a lover of romance. I feel love is one feeling that no one can get rid of; it is one of the elements that can patch up hurt, and it is also an element that can be expressed in many different forms. Having a wide imagination also adds to this passion. I grew up watching Disney movies such as Ariel and FairyTopia. Not only do I draw my inspiration from movies but also from books. I love reading romance books, the image we create in our mind can take us beyond some images created in movies. It takes us to a world we normally don't see in real life.
Jane Austin is a classical writer of romance and a perfect combination of well-written English. The love Mr Darcy had for Elizabeth was explained with passion through the English language.
It addressed issues within that time, and the beauty of a girl, as well as the strength of a man, was portrayed well. Jane Austin has other books, but my favorite was this one.
Jane Austen's best-loved novel is an unforgettable story about the inaccuracy of first impressions, the power of reason, and above all the strange dynamics of human relationships and emotions.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated by Hugh Thomson and features an afterword by author and critic, Henry Hitchings.
A tour de force of wit and sparkling dialogue, Pride and…
Jera Fowler is hardly excited about having to keep a journal for ninth-grade English class. “What can happen in a day?” she grumps as she chronicles the 1984-85 school year. She doesn’t realize that a single day can be the dividing line between life and death. Forty years later, while…
I consider myself a disruptor of sorts, both in my life and in the art I make (I’m an actor, too). So I am by nature drawn to novels that bend and reshape (and sometimes ignore altogether) the rules and conventions that are supposed to govern the novelist’s craft and lead me to experience the world—and often the art of writing fiction itself—in ways I have never experienced either before. The novels on my list do just that.
I studied with Joe Heller at City College in New York, earned my MA in Creative Writing under his tutelage.
Catch-22 is his most well-known and celebrated work, of course; nevertheless, I consider his second novel, Something Happened, his deeply unsettling portrait of Bob Slocum, a mid-level executive in a disintegrating marriage and estranged from his children who is navigating the minefield of his corporate life, and the devastating anxiety, soul-numbing alienation and paralyzing dread his journey produces that bears fruit at last in the tragedy he has expected and feared and sought desperately to avoid for so long, to be his true masterpiece.
It provided me with an essential lesson in the use of narrative tension to engage readers on a deeper, more subliminal level and keep them engaged until the very last word.
Structurally, stylistically, even thematically, echoes of Something Happened permeate my own novel: the often…
Bob Slocum was a promising executive. He had an attractive wife, three children, a nice house, and as many mistresses as he desired. His life was settled and ordered; he had conformed and society demanded he be happy - or at least pretend to be, But the pretence was becoming more and more difficult, as Slocum's discontent grew into an overwhelming sense of desolation, frustration and fear. And then something happened. . .
I’m a military veteran who has read science fiction and fantasy since the second grade. After reading everything on my parent’s bookshelves, everything in the school and public libraries, I had a teacher recommend I become an author. I love stories about strong-willed individuals standing up for what they believe in and changing the world. I have a master’s degree in engineering, a love for well-built things and taking stuff apart to see how it works, and a fascination with people and how they behave. In addition to writing, I am an avid gamer and a dabbler in a variety of things, from metalworking to hiking.
I read this book in high school and absolutely loved the entire idea, of essentially a prisoner of war escape plan similar to The Great Escape, set in a science fiction universe against the scale and scope of a planet.
I love how the author took a main character that had been so strong and tough through seven previous books and made her vulnerable, gave her new room to grow, and allowed some of her supporting cast to shine as well.
For eight bloody years, Commodore Honor Harrington has been in the forefront of the battle between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the vastly more powerful People's Republic of Haven. Now Honor has fallen, captured by the Peep Navy, turned over to the forces of State Security, and executed, her death shown on the interstellar network's nightly news. The Manticoran Alliance is determined to avenge her. Yet their military is over-extended and the People's Republic is poised to take the offensive once more. And neither protagonist is aware of events on a distant, isolated, inescapable prison planet called Hell. Honor…
Currently, the world seems concerned that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy the world or at least put many of us out of jobs. Only a few years ago, a significant part of the population believed that COVID-19 was made in a Chinese laboratory and intentionally or accidentally leashed on the world, killing millions. This isn’t just a theme in tech thrillers; it’s a theme in life. Whether it’s nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, AI, or some other type of technology, there’s always a fear that it’ll do more damage than good and, at its worst, bring an end to the world.
I’ve long been fascinated by the mysteries of the Anasazi, or the Pueblo Dwellers of southwestern Utah. How and why did a thriving culture of literally thousands of people who had built stone buildings into cliff faces suddenly and inexplicably disappear? Having read numerous books by archaeologists on the subject, I was really no closer to an answer. But when Preston and Child wrote a novel, a combination of adventure, tech thriller, and mythology, I was completely on board.
Archaeologist Nora Kelly’s father disappeared without a trace 16 years earlier in the remote desert, searching for the legendary Quivira, a city of gold and wonder, the lost city of the Anasazi Indians. Pulling together a team, using some NASA satellite research to find a starting place, Nora leads a team into the desolate canyonlands in search of the city—only to find extraordinary mythology, life-threatening natural events, and a deadly, dangerous…
On a visit to her family's abandoned Santa Fe ranch, archaeologist Nora Kelly discovers an old letter, written from her father to her mother, now both dead. What perplexes Nora is the fact that the faded envelope was mailed and postmarked only a few weeks earlier. Her father had vanished into the remote canyon country of Utah 16 years before, searching for Quivira, the fabled Lost City of Gold, whose legend has captivated explorers since the days of Coronado. Upon reading the letter, Nora learns that her father believed he had, in fact, located the lost city. But what happened…
The Sailor Without a Sweetheart
by
Katherine Grant,
Enjoy this Persuasion-inspired historical romance!
Six years ago, Amy decided *not* to elope with Captain Nate Preston. Now, he is back in the neighborhood, and he is shocked to discover that Amy is unmarried. Even more surprising, she is clearly battling some unnamed illness. Thrown together by circumstances outside their…
I am a reader and an author. Both my reading and writing diets are deeply grounded in gothic novels. This list mixes up some of the classics from way back with more recent works. All of them give the flavor of this fascinating realm in literature. There is nothing more satisfying than lucking into a story that is truly original, too, which these recommendations are. Find a comfy perch with a drink of your choosing and take some time with these books. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, and I stand behind all five of these recommendations.
This novel's compelling cover reeled in this reader straightaway and, indeed, delivers with a plot that captures the gothic folk horror genre in a tidy and well-written package.
As I read it, it felt like Harvest Home and The Wicker Man were seated on either shoulder. Overarching the story is also a "morality play" at work, expertly woven in. Bonus points for historical roots and an English village setting.
So original, so folky horror, so good and, simply put, a treat.
'Withered Hill is the ultimate nightmare destination' Laird Barron
Inside
A year ago Sophie Wickham stumbled into the isolated Lancashire village of Withered Hill, naked, alone and with no memory of who she is.
Surrounded by a thick ring of woodland, its inhabitants seem to be of another world, drenched in pagan, folklorish traditions.
As Sophie struggles to regain the memories of her life from before, she quickly realises she is a prisoner after multiple failed escape attempts. But is it the locals who keep her trapped, with smiles on their faces, or something else,…
