Living with Jane Austen

by Janet Todd

Overview

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that 'we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be'. Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how - for over half a century - Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life. Part personal memoir, part expert interaction with all the letters, manuscripts and published novels, Janet Todd's book reveals what living with Jane Austen has meant to her and what it might also mean to others. Todd celebrates the undimmable power of Austen's work to help us understand our own bodies and our environment, and teach us about patience, humour, beauty and the meaning of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009569316
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2025
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 8.23(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The Brightness of Pemberley; 2. The Darkness of Darcy; 3. Talking and Not Talking; 4. Making Patterns; 5. Poor Nerves; 6. The Unruly Body; 7. Into Nature; 8. Giving and Taking Advice; 9. Being in the Moment; 10. How to Die; Afterword.

Editorial Reviews

‘Intimate, knowledgeable and frequently unexpected, this is a book for all Jane Austen's readers by one of the very best of those readers.' Richard Cronin, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Glasgow

‘Sharing a mind is as exciting as sharing a bed. In this gentle, witty, semi-memoir, Janet Todd reveals her eccentric encounters with books and shows us why the novels of Jane Austen should matter to all of us now.’ Miriam Margolyes

‘This is a book for all Jane Austen’s readers by one of the very best of those readers.’ Richard Cronin, author of Byron’s Don Juan: The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century

‘Jan Todd invents a new genre, part memoir, part literary criticism, to tell the captivating story of a life of reading. Benefiting from extensive study of Jane Austen and her world, Janet Todd shows us how to live with Austen’s novels, to read them and reread them and weave them into the texture of our lives. Witty and inviting, this book offers both a fresh perspective on Austen and a moving record of the struggles of feminist scholarship in the academy.’ Maud Ellmann, author of The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud

‘A timely, moving and masterful book by one of the English-speaking world’s foremost literary historians and a trailblazing scholar-heroine in Jane Austen studies.’ Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen

‘Todd is eloquent about the joys of a long reading life in which an oeuvre can mature and mellow; ‘Like the primrose or peony, Jane Austen’s novels (or Schubert’s Lieder) have become more beautiful to me now that I take time with them than they were half a lifetime ago’.’ Claire Harman, TLS

From the Publisher

2024-12-28
Celebrating a beloved writer.

British biographer, novelist, memoirist, and literary scholar Todd admits that she was late in discovering Jane Austen. “She wasn’t my childhood passion,” she writes, but certainly Austen has become a significant focus of her scholarship: Todd edited the Cambridge edition of Austen’s works and is deeply knowledgeable about her life and times. In an engaging melding of memoir and literary analysis, Todd offers a close reading and personal response to Austen’s most indelible characters, including Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and the Dashwood sisters, Marianne and Elinor, as well as the men, relatives, friends, and neighbors with whom they interacted. As she reflects on Austen, Todd charts her own path as a scholar, first in England and then in the U.S., where she studied and taught at a time when women’s studies and French critical theory were shaping English departments. Both perspectives informedWomen’s Friendship in Literature, her book about intimate relationships in women’s fiction and in their authors’ real lives. Austen appeared in that book, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, the subject of another of Todd’s biographies, who also features significantly in this current volume. Besides responding to Austen’s fiction, Todd takes a discerning—and admiring—look at her letters: “mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people—some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment—and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine.” Although Todd finds the letters captivating, the novels have proven most revelatory for her, spreading “out and round me like rich material, a shot silk of rippling ambivalence, of passion and affection, temperamental undercurrents, neediness and intellectual solitude, confusions clarified, resilience, exertion and stillness—and love (however ironised).”

A gift for Austen’s devoted readers on the 250th anniversary of her birth.

Kirkus Reviews