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It is a truth universally acknowledged that just about every woman in the Western world for more than a century has grown up reading, living, and occasionally breathing Jane Austen. The brilliant Victorian novelist proved such a master of the form that she helped bring it to respectability, and she is essentially ubiquitous in media adaptations and remakes, from the teen romance to the Bollywood treatment, and with everyone from Gwyneth to Keira getting a crack at her feisty and intelligent characters. This week, not one, not two, but three book club books based on Austen’s life, contributions, and legend are being released, so you can binge and get your new Jane fix. They establish her as not only a renowned writer but also a rebel and even a revolutionary. (Mr. Darcy is just a bonus.)
<em>On the Sofa With Jane Austen</em>
The only thing more ubiquitous than Austen’s novels is commentary on Austen’s novels. Maggie Lane is one of Austen’s best-known acolytes; a frequent lecturer on the circuit, she has published in just about every Austen-focused journal known to man. She edits the Jane Austen Society’s UK newsletter, and she has published many previous books on the author, including Understanding Austen, Jane Austen and Food, and Growing Older With Jane Austen. If that wasn’t enough, she’s also a regular contributor to and editor of Regency World magazine, and the 21 essays in On the Sofa With Jane Austen have all graced its pages.
<em>Jane Austen, the Secret Radical</em>
People have been writing about Austen for hundreds of years, but why? For an author to have such staying power and such a hefty body of scholarship, she can’t just have charming characters and entertaining plots; there has to be something deeper, something that resonates through time. In Helena Kelly’s new book, she argues that Austen wasn’t just a good author; she was a boundary-pushing radical who managed to push her progressive ideas through in an easily palatable form.
<em>The Jane Austen Project</em>
At first glance, Jane Austen doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with speculative fiction, but her popularity and status as a “secret radical” has led her to become the jumping-off point for new flights of radical fiction. The Jane Austen Project is one such story, which postulates that, if Austen is still painfully relevant now, she’ll be even more so in the future. Kathleen Flynn, New York Times editor, writes of a future where we’ve ruined our atmosphere, but we’ve also newly invented time travel. In Old Britain, The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics has recently perfected it, in fact, and one of the inventors happens to be a huge Jane Austen fan.
