Jane Austen’s Bookshelf. By Rebecca Romney. Marysue Rucci Books; 464 pages; $29.99. Ithaka Press; £25
Legions of “Janeites” will spend 2025—the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth—truffle-hunting for undiscovered morsels in the life and work of English literature’s most famous woman author. Amid all the “Austenmania”, including balls, festivals, podcasts, television series and new books, what are the odds of finding something new?
An American rare-book dealer, Rebecca Romney, has managed it, by searching where Austen’s secrets lie hidden in plain sight: her letters and books. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” surveys the female writers she admired and whose novels laid the groundwork for everything from gothic thrillers to today’s romantasy boom.
Ms Romney is known for her bibliographic sleuthing on “Pawn Stars”, an American TV show that features experts appraising objects brought to a pawnshop in Las Vegas. Embarrassed by her own ignorance and shocked at the erasure of these writers from the canon, she set out to use the tools of her trade to answer a question: did Austen’s predecessors disappear from the canon because their books were simply “trash”?
No. Take Frances Burney, in whose novel “Cecilia” (1782) the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appears. Burney’s debut, “Evelina”, was a literary sensation, reprinted four times in its first year. Her third, “Camilla”, is cited tongue-in-cheek by Austen in “Northanger Abbey” as “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”.
Or consider Ann Radcliffe, the mother of the gothic horror novel, whose “The Mysteries of Udolpho” also obsesses characters in Austen’s “Northanger Abbey”. Radcliffe’s novel helped create a new genre that represented one-third of the British fiction market in the 1790s. Austen’s bookshelf also included Charlotte Smith, a poet admired by William Wordsworth, whose first novel, “Emmeline”, Austen read at 16 and praised in her own youthful stories. And her favourite was probably Maria Edgeworth, author of “Belinda”, a society novel, to whom Austen had a copy of her own “Emma” sent in homage.
If they were so popular in their own time, how did these authors slip “from the spotlight…to the shadows”? Like most Austen fans, Ms Romney was not familiar with most of Austen’s foremothers. She concludes that the authors and books Austen revered, and in some cases consciously emulated, were shunned by male literary critics, falling prey to what scholars call “the Great Forgetting”.
The Regency era saw both the rise of the modern novel and a backlash against female authors, derided as “scribblers”. Critics’ disdain coincided with the first time in history when more women published novels than men. Each female writer’s fate was slightly different: Radcliffe, for example, was doomed by the creepy genre she popularised. (One male critic spoke for many of his peers when he derided women writers’ “images of the grosser sort” and dismissed the genre as “a species of…literary prostitution”.)
Ms Romney is not the only scholar to describe Austen’s “sister authors”, most of whose books are now available online in the public domain. But the chronicle of her quest to find and explain the importance of their texts is written with a light, wry touch. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” is thus a spirited and scholarly rebuke to centuries of literary bias.
Perhaps the most fascinating lineage she traces is from these 18th-century “romances” (defined as any work with fantastical elements), to Austen’s genteel “courtship novels”, to the dragon-packed love stories flying off shelves today. Such romances give women starring roles and agency, whether in love, marriage or on epic quests. In the case of Austen’s predecessors, too, there is a “happily ever after”: if you have ever wished Jane Austen had written more books, a bookshelf full of her favourite writers is just waiting to be read. ■
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