Is this book my platonic ideal of a non-fiction book? Maybe. Probably. So much so that I have in fact already ordered and received my own copy of the book. Why am I not rounding it up to 5? I don’t know.
The topic was always likely to draw me in. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf chronicles the women authors that would have appeared on Austen’s own shelf. Yes, please – that sounds great. But it’s probably the author’s point of view that pushes this one over the edge into the delight category for me. Rebecca Romney is a rare book seller, which means that she approaches books not only for their content, but for their history as an object. Yes!
Rebecca Romney’s authorial voice is so clear that it feels like she is just talking to you about the things that bring her joy, but also the things that made her go… wait a damn minute. Which is kind of exactly the sort of writing that I love. I have read not a single one of the books that Romney hunts down in her quest to collect and read books mentioned by Austen, but now I have so much more insight into Austen’s writing than I did before and am interested in perhaps pursuing some of these classics on my own. I do love to upend the ‘canon’ whenever I can.
Speaking of the canon Romney does a good job of laying out the literary landscape of the late 18th and 19th centuries including how it was contemporaneously described and how much of a concerted effort was made to minimize women’s writings (to the point that at least one of the authors highlighted in this book was ashamed of her own writing).
Bingo Space: Craft. A book about the women author’s craft and how it was praised and diminished.
