**USA Today Bestseller!Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.**Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wil...

The Romantic period saw the first generations of professional women writers flourish in Great Britain. Literary history is only now giving them the attention they deserve, for the quality of their writings and for their popularity in their own time. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores the challenges and achievements of this fascinating set of women writers, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley along...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is eminently, delightfully, and delectably quotable. This truth goes far beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice, which has muscled out many other excellent sentences. So many gems of wit and wisdom from her novels deserve to be better known, from Northanger Abbey on its lovable, naive heroine—"if adventures will not befal a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad"—to Persuasion's movin...

An engaging account of how Jane Austen became a household name.Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the 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, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, th...

Publishing for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, this unmissable book offers an incisive and entertaining look at her life, writing, and legacy.You may have thought Jane Austen was a quiet spinster, but Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest*.* Tracing the author’s life and legacy across 250 years, she reveals an Austen far wilder than the one we know.Looser takes a deep dive into Austen’s work, offering fresh insights into her six completed nov...

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century.Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved a...

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleUntil recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some w...

An engaging account of how Jane Austen became a household name.Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the 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, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, th...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elin...

Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first effo...

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser."[Narrator] Marisa Calin's pleasant British accent is perfect for this exploration of Regency-era social codes and wild-hearted women." — AudioFileThieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest a...

Bloomsbury presents Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser, read by Larissa Thompson.Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Mari...