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

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf is part literary analysis and part book collecting. She collects books by women writers whom Jane Austen mentioned in her novels or in her letters. As a Jane Austen fan, I have been told, over and over again, that she was the first and the only woman writer in English literature before the Victorian Era who was worthy of our time, and there were either none or only inferior ones before her. How wrong it is.

There are a total of 8 Authors included in the book:

– Frances Burney (her courtship novels directly influenced Jane Austen)
– Ann Radcliffe (the most famous and influential gothic fiction author, directly influenced all later gothic writers, men or women; Dickens studied her book to learn how to write a cliffhanger)
– Charlotte Lennox (self-made, very independently minded woman with a distinctive personality; one of her heroines drew a sword to fight off her attacker)
– Charlotte Smith (an upper class poet who contributed to the revival of sonnet form in England, and a novelist who praised the French Revolution, all the while suffering in a terrible marriage)
– Hannah More (a moralist and an abolitionist, Jane Austen disliked her; Romney couldn’t finish either her book or her biography)
– Elizabeth Inchbald (born farm girl, a self-made actress, playwright and novelist, very popular, famous for her witty characters)
– Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (an upper class woman who wrote beautiful travelogs and novels; after a terrible marriage, married an Italian musician for love)
– Maria Edgeworth (a popular and highly influential Anglo-Irish novelist and educator; Jane Austen admired her work; directly influenced Dickens; pigeonholed to be only an Irish writer after death)

Some anecdotes:

– “Romance” meant a story of imagination, not love. Books about love and marriage were called courtship novels.
– Why women often faint in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic fictions: possibly because it’s a freeze reaction; when they encountered a potential sexual assault, their class and manner wouldn’t allow them to flight or fight, so freeze was the only option

Books I should seek out:
– The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
– A Simple Story by Elizabeth Inchbald, but only the first half as Romney suggested
– Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth

Romney’s bookshop is about an hour drive from me. I’d love to see her Jane Austen’s Bookshelf collection, but sadly it’s by appointment only.