Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
In Love with Jane
By Diane Johnson
A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen
by Richard Jenkyns
Oxford University Press, 215 pp., $25.00
Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinshipin English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818
by Ruth Perry
Cambridge University Press,476 pp., $80.00
Jane Austen
by Darryl Jones
Palgrave Macmillan, 252 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Searching for Jane Austen
by Emily Auerbach
University of Wisconsin Press, 344 pp., $35.00
Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
by Peter Knox-Shaw
Cambridge University Press, 275 pp., $75.00
Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets
by William Deresiewicz
Columbia University Press, 211 pp., $29.50
In A Fine Brush on Ivory, his 'appreciation' of Jane Austen, Richard Jenkyns remarks that in Austen scholarship there are 'pressures which cause ordinary critical circumspection to break down,' and principal among them is 'the peculiar affection in which the person of Jane Austen is held by many readers.' This affection is not altogether explained by admiration for her genius, nor is it entirely a symptom of nostalgia for her orderly, decorous, vanished world (though there is a Web site, www.pemberley.com: 'your haven in a world programmed to misunderstand obsession with things Austen'). What does explain this 'peculiar affection' for Jane Austen?
Review, 4522 words
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