Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

Shortly after it begins, Rebecca Romney’s first solo work of nonfiction “becomes something of a mystery novel,” said Charlotte Gordon in The Washington Post. By chance, Romney, a rare-books collector, comes upon a 1778 novel by a woman who turns out to have been one of Jane Austen’s favorite authors. Suddenly it occurs to Romney that perhaps her beloved Austen was not, as is often said, the first great female novelist.

A hunt begins. Which women did Austen read? And how good were they? Soon she’s deep in literary history’s wilderness, “eyes peeled, slashing through forests of lies, gleefully knocking experts off their thrones.” Yes, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and several other Austen forebears had disappeared. But Romney came to love many of their novels, and she “makes us want to read them, too.”

“Each author’s life is, if not stranger than fiction, a story that could make itself at home there,” said Celia McGee in Air Mail. Charlotte Smith married an abusive man when she was 15 and used novel writing to assert her independence. Historian and diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi defiantly carried on a long extramarital affair with the celebrated Samuel Johnson. Crucially, as Romney reviews these women’s work, she “convincingly connects their relevance to Austen’s ability to capture character, her celebrated sense of irony, and her hardheaded yet tender assessment of emotions.” Not all of Romney’s discoveries are new, but her curiosity is contagious, and her account of her hunt doubles as “a very gradual reveal of how Rebecca Romney came to be.”

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Romney’s memoir is indeed “more personal and idiosyncratic than the cozy title might suggest,” said Sadie Stein in The New York Times. In fact, “I was less interested in seeing her hot on the case of the Missing Canon than I was in watching this one reader learning, and thinking, in real time.” Raised in Idaho as a conservative Mormon, Romney pushed back against gender strictures as she matured, and here, her passages on how she overcame internalized misogyny to appreciate romance novels represent passionate criticism at its best. Earlier, when I picked up this seemingly tame book, “I certainly didn’t expect to make so many furious notes in the margins.”