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

As someone who has reveled in the discovery the last few years that yes, there were other great women writers before and during the time of Jane Austen, I enjoyed this book tremendously! It devotes a chapter each to eight of Austen's "colleagues" — that is, women writers she definitely read and appreciated. A well-researched work like this really helps open up an era of history that can otherwise feel like it sits two-dimensionally in the pages of only its most famous writers. That is far from the truth, as revealed in this book. There is much to learn and so many real and complicated individuals that are not lost to history, especially thanks to the current ease of access to public domain books on the Internet.