Jane Austen in Context

"To me that collection of essays is the best option for someone seeking a strong foundation in Austen as she’s understood today. If you’re looking for a book on Austen that’ll blow your mind, this is it. Janet Todd has assembled some of the best Austen scholars in the world and had them each write short, original essays in an accessible form. Contributors describe the state of knowledge and debate on Austen’s biography, reception history, illustration history, book production, sequels, and translations, to name just a few of my favourite chapters. I also really like Margaret Kirkham’s section on Jane Austen’s portraits. Austen’s portraits are such a fraught topic and source of vigorous debate – which ones are really her? Which ones might be her? Which ones aren’t even worth arguing about? Kirkham walks us through, in a portrait-by-portrait way, how to make sense of these debates, describing the provenance of particular images; it’s a matter of how to assess these portraits and the known evidence, without concluding ‘this one just must be her’. It’s a measured approach that’s both factual and exploratory. “Austen’s fiction works to makes us collude with her politics, wanting certain kinds of change, often without realising that that’s what we’re being asked to do” A lot of the chapters in Todd’s Jane Austen in Context take that kind of approach: here are the debates. Here’s what we know. You draw your own conclusions. The critics don’t hit us over the head with ‘here’s the only way to think about these things.’ Yes. I’ve used this book in teaching before, too, and students especially seem to get very excited about these sections, where they can come to grips with food, accomplishments, rank, landownership. In an American context, some of these things are not easy to understand. You need someone to walk you through the basics and then show you how to really ramp up your knowledge beyond that."