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

This book might easily disappoint readers who come to it with mistaken expectations. As I read it, I kept having to adjust my sense of what it was about and what it was trying to do.

What it is not:
(1) A study of Jane Austen’s novels.
(2) A work of scholarship tracing Austen’s literary influences in her texts.

Once I had rid myself of these suppositions, I could enjoy the book more. What it is: a memoir by a rare book dealer about her journey of discovering the greatness of female authors who were recognized and praised (more or less) by Jane Austen; and an interrogation of the notion that authorities can determine what is, and isn’t, worth reading. Rebecca Romney achieves these aims quite well.

Each of the book’s chapters zeroes in on a single author. After a short introductory chapter about Austen herself, Romney examines the life and literary contributions of Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth. (The chapter on Maria Edgeworth disappointed me a bit by leaving out what happened to Edgeworth after her father died; the back half of that chapter is devoted to laying out Romney’s main thesis.)

Romney takes an interesting path in her explorations, one non-obvious to those accustomed to scholarly research but nevertheless revealing and suited to her skills: she traces the reputations of the writers through editions of their books and literary commentaries about them over the course of centuries. She has a persistent interest in why these authors, so famous and revered in their day, largely disappeared from view after their deaths. What she uncovers is a pattern familiar to feminist critics—minimization, what I call “niching,” even lies attributing their work to others. She articulates clearly what many female readers have noticed over the years—that there is space in the “canon” of important literature for an infinite number of men but a limited number of women (basically, one per era), so the inclusion of one Georgian-era female author (Austen) demands the exclusion of all the others.

This is a familiar consequence of the “othering” of women, so I felt the observation could have been made at less length. I did find the book sometimes self-absorbed and windy; Romney could have articulated her conclusions without quite so lovingly tracing every step she took to get there. Nevertheless, for people who have not read about the lives or works of the authors she covers, the biographical details and the windows into their literary oeuvre are very valuable. Although I’m moderately fluent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, I learned some new things along the way.

I also enjoyed the book-dealer-style detective work. It was fascinating to see how her collation discipline—the process of examining each page of a newly acquired volume to understand it better—and her critical reading of dealers’ book descriptions gave her important clues to the writers’ lives and the devaluation and revaluation of their reputations.

As an aside, a good companion work for people whose interest is sparked after reading this book would be Susannah Gibson’s The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement.

This examination of Austen’s precursors is not comprehensive: I missed mentions of Jane West, Susan Ferrier, Clara Reeves, Mary Hays, and more. That’s not a knock on the book, it’s just a recognition that there is more lode in this mine—an acknowledgment that would probably please Romney, since she situates her work explicitly in a larger context of explorers devoted to rediscovering the works of female writers. I don’t think Romney would object to being called a “partial, prejudiced historian.”