Good Reads for Austen Lovers

In my last blog, I wrote about Devoney Looser’s book on the Porter sisters, two writers who were much more popular than Austen in her day and who wrote historical fiction a decade before Walter Scott, who supposedly invented the genre. At the end, I promised to write about other good books that I read during the year. I’ve picked three to highlight among the “best of” 2023.

I have read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre several times each, but until 2023 I had never examined The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by the third sister, Anne. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it was not as good as the others because it went out of print so early. Yet that decision turns out to have been Charlotte’s after Emily died young.

In many ways, I found Wildfell Hall superior to the other Brontë books, more realistic and hard nosed. The novel tells the story of a woman who puts up with a drunken, abusive husband for as long as possible, finally fleeing in order to raise her son away from the father’s terrible influence.

She not only abandons her husband and breaks English law by taking the son with her, but—horror of Victorian horrors—she also makes a living as an artist. Further, her arrival in a remote, small village, where she occasionally visits with male acquaintances, leads to her becoming the subject of ugly gossip. It is an unsparing, unsentimental look at a woman who dares to do what is right for herself and her child in a society locked in convention.

Good nonfiction books include Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art. Writing more than eighty years ago, Lascelles offers a sensitive reading of each of Austen’s novels, their merits relative to one another, and their merits relative to other works of her era.

Most of Austen’s writing contemporaries, she says, were “unprofessional, or of small pretensions,” were writing for readers “casual and uncritical,” and treated their characters as “puppets.” In contrast, Austen treated her characters “as though they belonged to the actual world.” The unerring “rectitude” of novelistic heroes was “repellent,” whereas Austen’s heroes were flawed. Her heroines being equally flawed, Austen “preferred the world’s actual to its painted face.”

Juliette Wells’ 2023 book, A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist (image at top), provides mini histories on four Americans who, in their time, were ahead of the British in their detailed appreciation of Austen’s artistic accomplishments.

Oscar Fay Adams, William Dean Howells, and Charles Beecher Hogan all wrote appreciatively and with care about Austen in the mid to late 1800s. Alberta Burke’s lifetime of collecting Austen books, letters, and related materials ultimately formed the heart of Goucher College’s Austen collection.

Hogan also donated the Austen sisters’ two topaz crosses (a gift from their youngest brother Charles) to the Jane Austen Society in the UK, while Burke gifted a lock of Austen’s hair to what is now Jane Austen’s House in Chawton.

Adams, in particular, displayed a shrewd understanding of Austen as a writer. Burke usually passed her information on to others, though she occasionally wrote letters to literary editors. Her correspondence showcases her knowledge, and I heartily agree with her disparagement of “impenetrable approaches to Austen’s writing” often practiced by scholars.

Sadly, once the British became involved in academizing Austen, they elbowed the earlier Americans aside. Either because they lacked formal academic training or because they were American—probably both—these four are largely ignored in the British studies and bibliographies in the early twentieth century, which disappeared them from the literary tradition. Wells brings their stories, travels, and accomplishments again to the forefront.

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The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen, a trilogy that traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions, is available from Jane Austen Books and Amazon. A “boxed set” that combines all three in an e-book format is available here.