Yale doctoral candidate Carson cobbles together previously published pieces of literary criticism by writers like Eudora Welty and Lionel Trilling with essays, several newly composed, by contemporary writers like Anna Quindlen and Fay Weldon. Pride and Prejudice
fan Somerset Maugham finds Emma a snob and Mansfield Park
's Fanny and Edmund intolerable prigs. Virginia Woolf contemplates what books Austen might have written had she lived beyond 42, speculating that her satire would have been more severe, and Amy Heckerling describes how she transformed Emma
into the teen romance film Clueless
set in 1990s Beverly Hills. C.S. Lewis finds that Austen's hard core of morality is what makes good comedy possible, and in one of the most personal essays, Brian Southam tells how he searched out a volume of juvenilia at a Kentish farmhouse belonging to Austen's great-great-niece. Heckerling aside, dissections of very particular plot and character points in most essays make this volume more appropriate to students than lay readers. And while separately the pieces make many astute points about Austen's oeuvre, overall the volume feels disjointed. (Nov.)
