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.
"Jane Austen was a voracious and extensive reader, so it's perhaps no surprise that many of her characters display a similar appetite for the written word. But what did her characters read and what would their literary choices have meant to Austen's own readership, both at the time and today? This book answers that question and more, focusing on each of her novels and unpacking the multiple (and often surprising) ways in which these inform the reading of Austen's works"--
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.
