Wild For Austen by Devoney Looser

 

Devoney Looser's newest book, published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth by Manchester University Press is a look at Jane Austen’s life, legacy, and writing. Looser examines Austen’s entire literary output from the juvenilia to the unfinished novels. Many Austen devotees unfamiliar with her teenage writings might be surprised at what can be found there. Austen pokes fun and provokes reaction with many of her early stories, letters and plays, parodying popular works with her tales of unrepentant gamblers, cannibal children and a hat stealing Cassandra.

Looser also examines Austen’s life and her family which at times was a lot less genteel and cossetted than the lives of many of her heroines. Austen grew up adjacent to wealthy families such as the Austen-Knights, but she and her parents and sister often struggled with poverty especially after her father’s death. It was also through her family that Jane was able to access a wide range of reading material and Looser explores this too. There were writers and publishers in the family and Jane’s family were for the most part supportive of her writing and her efforts to be published.

And of course, Looser explores Austen’s legacy, many writers have been inspired by Austen’s writing, not just those who have adapted her work for stage and screen but countless novelists over the last two hundred years have drawn on her work. Looser is an expert on Austen having already penned The Making of Jane Austen (2017) and a number of other works on women writers.

This is an ideal read for fans of Austen looking to gain an insight into how her work fits into the context of her life and times and in understanding her impact. An ideal and timely tribute.

Wild for Austen is published on September 23rd