Jane Austen's England

Author: Roy Adkins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101622865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
An authoritative account of everyday life in Regency England, the backdrop of Austen’s beloved novels, from the authors of the forthcoming Gibraltar: The Greatest Siege in British History (March 2018) Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of the English language, wrote brilliantly about the gentry and aristocracy of two centuries ago in her accounts of young women looking for love. Jane Austen’s England explores the customs and culture of the real England of her everyday existence depicted in her classic novels as well as those by Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Drawing upon a rich array of contemporary sources, including many previously unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and personal letters, Roy and Lesley Adkins vividly portray the daily lives of ordinary people, discussing topics as diverse as birth, marriage, religion, sexual practices, hygiene, highwaymen, and superstitions. From chores like fetching water to healing with medicinal leeches, from selling wives in the marketplace to buying smuggled gin, from the hardships faced by young boys and girls in the mines to the familiar sight of corpses swinging on gibbets, Jane Austen’s England offers an authoritative and gripping account that is sometimes humorous, often shocking, but always entertaining.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

Author: Daniel Pool
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143914480X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
A “delightful reader’s companion” (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England. For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell “Tally Ho!” at a fox hunt, or how one landed in “debtor’s prison,” this book serves as an indispensable historical and literary resource. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the “plums” in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both “upstairs” and “downstairs. An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from “ague” to “wainscoting,” the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

The Daily Jane Austen

Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665544X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
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 moving lines of love from its regret-filled hero: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late.” Devoney Looser, a.k.a. Stone Cold Jane Austen, has drawn 378 genuine, Austen-authored passages from across the canon, resulting in an anthology that is compulsively readable and repeatable. Whether you approach the collection on a one-a-day model or in a satisfying binge read, you will emerge wiser about Austen, if not about life. The Daily Jane Austen will amuse and inspire skeptical beginners, Janeite experts, and every reader in between by showcasing some of the greatest sentences ever crafted in the history of fiction.

Why Jane Austen?

Author: Rachel M. Brownstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Rachel M. Brownstein considers Jane Austen as heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author, along with the changing notions of these categories over time and texts. She finds echoes of many of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, a commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims to preserve and liberate, correct and collaborate with old Jane.

The Making of Jane Austen

Author: Devoney Looser
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
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, 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.

Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister

Author: Sheila Johnson Kindred
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773552081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
In 1807 genteel, Bermuda-born Fanny Palmer (1789–1814) married Jane Austen's youngest brother, Captain Charles Austen, and was thrust into a demanding life within the world of the British navy. Experiencing adventure and adversity in wartime conditions both at sea and onshore, the spirited and resilient Fanny travelled between Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and England. For just over a year, her home was in the city of Halifax. After crossing the Atlantic in 1811, she ingeniously made a home for Charles and their daughters aboard a working naval vessel and developed a supportive friendship with his sister, Jane. In Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister Fanny's articulate and informative letters – transcribed in full for the first time and situated in their meticulously researched historical context – disclose her quest for personal identity and autonomy, her maturation as a wife and mother, and the domestic, cultural, and social milieu she inhabited. Sheila Johnson Kindred also investigates how Fanny was a source of naval knowledge for Jane, and how she was an inspiration for Austen's literary invention, especially for the female naval characters in Persuasion. Although she died young, Fanny's story is a compelling record of female naval life that contributes significantly to our limited knowledge of women's roles in the Napoleonic Wars. Enhanced by rarely seen illustrations, Fanny's life story is a rich new source for Jane Austen scholars and fans of her fiction, as well as for those interested in biography, women's letters, and history of the family.

What Matters in Jane Austen?

Author: John Mullan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620400448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Which important Austen characters never speak? Is there any sex in Austen? What do the characters call one another, and why? What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness.? ?In twenty short chapters, each of which explores a question prompted by Austens novels, Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most in her beloved fiction. Readers will discover when Austen's characters had their meals and what shops they went to; how vicars got good livings; and how wealth was inherited. What Matters in Jane Austen? illuminates the rituals and conventions of her fictional world in order to reveal her technical virtuosity and daring as a novelist. It uses telling passages from Austen's letters and details from her own life to explain episodes in her novels: readers will find out, for example, what novels she read, how much money she had to live on, and what she saw at the theater.? ? Written with flair and based on a lifetime's study, What Matters in Jane Austen? will allow readers to appreciate Jane Austen's work in greater depth than ever before.

Some Words of Jane Austen

Author: Stuart M. Tave
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663339X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Jane Austen’s readers continue to find delight in the justness of her moral and psychological discriminations. But for most readers, her values have been a phenomenon more felt than fully apprehended. In this book, Stuart M. Tave identifies and explains a number of the central concepts across Austen’s novels—examining how words like “odd,” “exertion,” and, of course, “sensibility,” hold the key to understanding the Regency author’s language of moral values. Tracing the force and function of these words from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, Tave invites us to consider the peculiar and subtle ways in which word choice informs the conduct, moral standing, and self-awareness of Austen’s remarkable characters.

The Jane Austen Diet

Author: Bryan Kozlowski
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1684422132
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
What can Jane Austen teach us about health? Prepare to have your bonnet blown... From the food secrets of Pride and Prejudice to the fitness strategies of Sense and Sensibility, there’s a modern health code hidden in the world’s most popular romances. Join Bryan Kozlowski as he unlocks this “health and happiness” manifesto straight from Jane Austen’s pen, revealing why her prescriptions for achieving total body “bloom” still matter in the 21st century. Whether that’s learning how to eat like Lizzie Bennet, exercise like Emma Woodhouse, or think like Elinor Dashwood, explore how Austen’s timeless body beliefs are more relevant, refreshing, and scientifically sensible now than ever before. After all, it's still a truth universally acknowledged – Jane Austen’s heroines don’t get fat.

Dear Jane Austen

Author: Patrice Hannon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101213558
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Advice delivered with sense and sensibility just in time for the major motion picture Becoming Jane Women have looked to Jane Austen’s heroines as models of appropriate behavior for nearly two centuries. Who better to understand the heart of a heroine than Austen? In this delightful epistolary “what if,” Austen serves as a “Dear Abby” of sorts, using examples from her novels and her life to counsel modern-day heroines in trouble, she also shares with readers a compelling drama playing out in her own drawing room. Witty and wise—and perfectly capturing the tone of the author of Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice—Dear Jane Austen is as satisfying as sitting down to tea with the novelist herself.