Description

The first detailed account of Austen’s characters’ reading experience to date, this book explores both what her characters read and what their literary choices would have meant to Austen’s own readership, both during her life and today.

Jane Austen was a voracious and extensive reader, so it’s perhaps no surprise that many of her characters are also readers-from Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice to Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Beginning by looking at Austen’s own reading as well as her interest in readers’ responses to her work, the book then focuses on each of her novels, looking at the particulars of her characters’ reading and unpacking the multiple (and often surprising) ways in which what they read informs our reading. What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why) uses Austen’s own love of reading to invite us to rethink the ways in which she imagined her characters and their lives beyond the novels.

Publisher Review

This is an excellent book on the importance of books and reading in Jane Austen’s life and works. Underpinned by careful research and insightful close readings of the novels, it clearly explains how understanding Austen’s literary allusions illuminates her work in vital new ways. * Professor Katherine Halsey, University of Stirling, UK * Susan Allen Ford’s scholarship on literary allusions in Jane Austen’s novels has long informed critical reading of Austen’s writing. With its focus on what Austen’s characters read, this publication not only offers brilliant new insights into those characters but also insights into Austen’s own reading and her deep critical familiarity with her predecessors and contemporaries. This book goes beyond those insights, however, to address, in graceful, accessible prose, Austen’s relationship with her own imagined readers and her expectations for those readers, indisputably proving Austen’s acute self-awareness of herself as an author and all that awareness implies. * Mary McBryde Mintz, President, Jane Austen Society of North America and Emerita Librarian, American University *