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

In this astute inquiry, rare books dealer Romney (coauthor of Printer’s Error) profiles the largely forgotten women writers who influenced Jane Austen. Romney suggests that Austen’s ambiguous endings that feature villains who escape their comeuppance reflect the imprint of Charlotte Smith, who wrote such feminist novels as Desmond to support herself and her children after separating from her husband left her destitute. Sexist double standards were a constant in the Georgian writers’ lives, Romney notes, describing how the kind of brash literary criticism that earned Samuel Johnson fame brought mainly scorn for his contemporary, novelist Charlotte Lennox (“Women could be witty—but not too witty”). Incisively dissecting how Austen’s forebears got written out of the English canon, Romney shows how late-19th-century male critics unfavorably compared them with Austen despite rarely pitting the era’s male authors against her or each other, implying that the critics were only willing to recognize a single, token woman author. Romney also makes a vehement case that Austen’s influences are major talents in their own right, as when she argues that Frances Burney’s “straight talk” style enabled her to directly tackle such topics as catcalling that Austen’s subtler approach handled only incidentally. This is a must for Janeites. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Feb.)