WILD FOR AUSTEN: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, excellent self-gifted read

WILD FOR AUSTEN: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane
DEVONEY LOOSER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Over eleven hundred endnotes.

One thousand one hundred plus end notes.

I was very very shocked to see this in its glory inside a non-academic book, albeit one by an academic who has spent her career toiling in Austen's vineyard. It's clear from reading this work that Author Looser thinks about Austen very much in a framework. An academic, analytical approach to what I can only describe as a wildly partisan, excitedly appreciative paean to Austen for her 250th birthday (tomorrow as I post this review).

I was very entertained by the discussion of Austen's work in "Wild Writings" because I'm not an Austenite. There are so many reasons for that...I'm male, and men come off very poorly indeed, is not one. Most come down to the absence of my chemistry response going ping the way it does with Eliot or Trollope or Anna Katharine Green. It's weird, but there it is, and reading Author Looser's warbles of rapture makes me feel vicariously the heights of appreciation my more muted pleasure won't reach.

In the second section, I switched on fully, thoroughly enjoying Austen's fascinating family relations. It's a section very aptly titled "Fierce Family Ties." Fierce is a good descriptor! Abolitionists, suffragists (not the later versions, but advocating for general male enfranchisement), progressives of all stripes...Jane Austen, lady novelist, also had lady novelist cousins...no matter where one looks, one finds her situated amid those who want to change the status quo for what looks to my twenty-first century eyes like the better.

Part three is Jane's afterlife, her posthumous career as an ikon. Here I felt uninvolved,uninspired...it took me two weeks to read this section because y'all superfans, well, when I don't share an obsession it's hard to work up enthusiasm for it. It was informative but not about something I care to learn about. That's the missing half-star explained.

I'd recommend this read to the holiday-weary Austenite because it really situates y'all in a cultural mainstream that's brought huge joy to the world. Could anything be more apt for a self-gifted read?