Review: Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

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

by Rebecca Romney 

Release Date: February 18, 2025

2025 S&S/Marysue Rucci Books

Softcover ARC; 455 Pages

ISBN: 978-1982190248

ASIN: B0CWNVBQPR

Audiobook: B0D7WDZCWJ

Genre: Non-Fiction / Historical / Biography / Literature / Women

Source: Review copy from publisher

 

3.75 / 5 Stars

 

Summary

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. 

 

My Thoughts

Jane Austen's Bookshelf was a comprehensive collection of short biographies outlining the lives and literary successes of a variety of women writers during the time period Jane Austen was flourishing, outlining the authors who may have had an impact/influence on Austen's own writing career. It's also a good investigation into why so many women writers during this time period are not as well known as Austen, how society trampled over the ambitions of these women, and how journalists and other writers downplayed the work of these writers, often attributing, erroneously, their contributions to male writers simply due to association. 

 

If you are a Jane Austen fan, then you will undoubtedly know she often made references to other women writers and their works in her books. Romney set about to discover more about these women writers, to learn more about their impact during their time periods as well as possible on Austen herself. 

 

The chapters include a variety of women, and while they contain as much biographical content to give the reader a good idea of what they suffered during their life, they also focused on their literary success, the impact it had on society, and the impact their works had on Romney's current reading and understanding of Georgian writers.  There are additional insights by Romney into the world of rare book collecting as she hunts for a variety of books that are contain information about these various authors. As a fellow bibliophile, I enjoyed Romney's search, and frustration, for these rare books as well as her discussions on their worth and what to look for in such rare books. As someone who hunts down rare books myself, I found these discussions fascinating and learned quite a bit.  

 

I thought the biographies of the women writers who influenced Austen were quite enjoyable and it made me want to dive back into the classics for a little while, something I haven't done for a few years. There are a couple of these women I have not yet read, so I appreciated the insights into their lives as well as Romney's thoughts as she read the books herself. There were moments when the descriptions did get a bit repetitive, and I felt like the author was losing the thread of her discussion and went off on a major tangent, but these were few and far between so it didn't bother me too much.   The additional insights into the publishing histories and policies, women's rights, discrimination, societal rules and restrictions, women's place in society, physical and mental abuse, suffering, and racial and gender discrimination were well thought out and made me think about the difficulties women went through to get their work published and accepted.  I did think this book would have benefited from photos about the books as that would have enhanced the descriptions. 

 

Verdict

Jane Austen's Bookshelf was an interesting read and will definitely be something that not only Austen fans will find enjoyable, but anyone who is interested in women writers during her era. One of my favourite classes at uni was a women's classic fiction course that was an elective (I was a science major), and I read some of these books for that class, but this book has made me interested in looking at some of those books again and exploring other women writers. I think this book will appeal to bibliophiles looking for more information on women writers without getting too bogged down in academic writings, and can be used as a launching pad to explore more in-depth if one wishes. For more academia minded people, I think this book will have too many descriptions about rare book collecting and other paraphernalia (such as her feelings and emotions about what she was reading) that cause it to not go in enough depth.