Dee's Reviews > Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

4 stars - very interesting! A rare bookseller discovers & dissects the women writers who influenced or were influenced by Austen. Much of this book also discusses “why” so many of these authors like F. Burney & M. Edgeware are not as well know as writers like Fielding, Dafoe and Dickens (the reason is of course that they were women - just trivial and silly romance "scribblers"😡🤬). There is also some very good discussions of how the patriarchy and especially male reviewers contributed to this silencing which impacts even the writers of our current time and also helps explain why the romance genre has been dismissed and viewed as “lesser” forever - how it is rejected as “formulaic” as though mystery is NOT, which is of course just total bullshit. I also appreciated learning more about each of these forgotten writers and also about rare book collecting and its dealers. A fascinating book and instructive and well worth the time to read! This is also my Women’s History month read.