The Making of Jane Austen

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and an inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser’s "The Making of Jane Austen" turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen’s early fame and laid the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.

Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen’s reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet’s audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead.

Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen’s reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen’s evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen’s literary and cultural power. Whether you’re a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, "The Making of Jane Austen" will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

Bio

Devoney Looser is a professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of "Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850" and "British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820."


Praise for this book

Austen fans have another book to add to their libraries.

Publishers Weekly

... energetic and revealing.

Jane Smiley The New York Times Book Review
Cover of The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser
Date published
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN
9781421422824

Get this book

Library catalog link