page_appropriate 's review for:

Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

5.0

hopeful informative inspiring medium-paced

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 Thank you to @_simonelement #ElementalReaders for my #gifted copy.  My opinions are my own.

If you have ever wished that Jane Austen had written more, then you need to hear what Rebecca Romney discovered: there’s a 40-year gap from which female fiction writers have been excised, called "The Great Forgetting."  Authors whose names you will recognize from Austen's own works were writing and influencing society and Austen's novels.  Austen isn't “the first great woman writer in English” as we've been taught--she's just the first female writer whose work has been accepted into the English canon.  Here Romney (a rare book collector and dealer) recounts in elevated yet personal prose her journey to collect important works by the authors that influenced Austen, not only for the stories they contain but for the stories of the physical books themselves.  Each chapter tells the story of one of eight different women writers who Austen read--authors whose works would have appeared on her "bookshelf."  And boy, was this a dangerous book because it seriously added to my TBR list.  The stories about these women were fascinating--they led fascinating lives, and wrote works that not only engaged society at the time but also reflected it (and now preserve it in ways that are still interesting to readers today).  The ability to capture and convey the universality of the human experience isn't limited to male authors, yet somehow women's accomplishments have systematically been left out of standard learning tools.  I found that more and more frustrating the more I read in this book, and I appreciate the book for itself but also for adding to my ability to value these underappreciated female writers who deserve their own place in the English canon. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Misogyny, Sexism