Who did Jane Austen read?

USA Today

14-03-2025

Who did Jane Austen read? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on March 13, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: There are few writers who have as devoted a following as celebrated English novelist Jane Austen, author of classics like 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Sense and Sensibility.' But is she really the 'first' great English female author? Rebecca Romney has built her career searching for rare books around the world. She joins The Excerpt to detail her path down a 5-years-long rabbit hole to discover the many female writers that Jane Austen was influenced by, something scholars had outright dismissed or just overlooked. Rebecca's new release 'Jane Austen's Bookshelf' is on bookshelves now.
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Dana Taylor:
There are a few writers who have as devoted a following as celebrated English novelist, Jane Austen. Author of classics like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. But is she really the first great English female author? Our guest today has built her career searching for rare books around the world. In her new book, Rebecca Romney chronicles her path down a five-years-long rabbit hole to discover the many female writers that Jane Austen was influenced by, something scholars had outright dismissed or just overlooked. Rebecca's new release. Jane Austen's Bookshelf is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Rebecca.
Rebecca Romney:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
I want to start with your essential motivation for the book. Why should people today care about what Jane Austen was reading all the way back in the early 1800s?
Rebecca Romney:
They should care about what Austen was reading then if they care about Austen. When I was first a devoted reader of Austen, she only has six completed novels, and I would just read and reread them wishing that she had written more. She died very young at age 41, and I felt, oh, if only she had had a chance to write more. But in fact, even though she didn't, we do have novels by the women that she was reading who influenced her novels, who were writing in the same vein. And so what I realized was Austen has great taste. Let me look at these books and see if they're great too. And the reason I felt the need to write the book about it was because I went back and read them and they were good. And so I had a moment where I thought, okay, if Austen loved them and I loved them, why don't we read them anymore? And that was the story that set off the entire chase.
Who did Jane Austen read?
Rebecca Romney, a rare books expert, spent 5 years searching for the female writers that inspired Austen.
Dana Taylor:
One of the questions your book aims to answer is which writers and novels become part of the literary canon, and who gets to decide what belongs there. So how does that work?
Rebecca Romney:
We use the canon as a quick list of advice from authorities about which books in the history of literature are important enough that they should be read far beyond their initial publication, because we don't have time to read everything. We have to make decisions in advance about which books we're going to read. So we listen to authorities to say, you tell me you've read a lot, what should I read? And the canon is a consensus of authorities. But what happens is that we tend to use canon as a brick wall. If it's not in the canon, it must not be good and that's just not true. The canon is best served as a starting off point rather than an ending point.
Dana Taylor:
What was your process to track down the writers that Jane Austen named in her books, and how did you find proof that she actually read their work?
Rebecca Romney:
The process was going to her own words? There is a passage in Austen's book, Northanger Abbey, where she kind of breaks form. She has a moment where she takes away from the plot and the heroine and all of her troubles, and has this impassioned defense of the novel. She says, "I don't know why we should be embarrassed about reading novels. Everyone is happy to brag about reading Milton, but they're embarrassed to read novels." And she says, "I completely disagree with this. Some of the greatest diffusions of the human mind were put in novels." And then she names some. She names two novels by a woman named Frances Burney, and she names a novel by Maria Edgeworth who was publishing at the time that she was trying to get published. So those authors became the bookends, the beginning and ending of my Bookshelf.
Dana Taylor:
You wrote that it stung when you first realized that you had overlooked Frances Burney, one of the most popular writers during Jane Austen's lifetime. How do you think you and other scholars miss these writers?
Rebecca Romney:
What happened to me is I'm a professional in rare books, and so I sell first editions of important English novels. I sell Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. I sell Samuel Richardson's books like Clarissa and Pamela. I sell Tristram Shandy. These are all major 18th century novels. And so I had this moment where it was almost professional embarrassment of how had I overlooked these authors? And when I started poking around, when I had that initial moment, I thought, okay, let me learn more. I'm going to take this as an opportunity to be curious. So I started to poke around and I realized that this part of the English novel was so systematically undervalued by critics over centuries that modern feminist recovery scholars have given it a name. They call it the great forgetting.
And so I was able to piggyback on the work of the modern feminist recovery movement in universities by professional scholars, in order to do my own version of it from the rare book side where I am actually collecting the books. And tracing the story of the rise and fall of the reputations of these authors over the course of my shelves book by book.
Dana Taylor:
Rebecca, on your list, which writer is your favorite to read and why?
Rebecca Romney:
That's a hard question. I am going to say Maria Edgeworth. Maria Edgeworth was the most acclaimed novelist, the most respected, most popularly read novelist during the period of about 1798 until well into when Austin's publishing. So essentially, Austin's trying to get published in the early 19th century and the 1800s and 1810s during that period. Maria Edgeworth is the number one novelist and the model that she's looking up to. I read probably about eight Maria Edgeworth novels, and I will say that I think Pride and Prejudice is a perfect book. But outside of that, Maria Edgeworth novels pound for pound match any of Austin's.
Dana Taylor:
Quite a few of these women writers that filled the chapters of your book were famous in their own times. What do you think were some of the reasons that they fell out of fashion?
Rebecca Romney:
Each woman has her own story about what happened to her reputation over the generations after her death. In some cases, it was direct attacks by critics. An example of that is Frances Burney, when her book The Wanderer came out, a critic wrote a very influential review calling her a mere common observer of manners and a very woman. Which he meant to say she only speaks about women's issues and that's not universal, that's not actually that interesting. If you're not universal, you're not canonical. So that was how he shunted her off to the side. But there are other writers like Ann Radcliffe whose reputations were affected in part because she stopped publishing at the height of her fame, and then retired and didn't want part of the public at all.
So people thought that she had died long before she actually had. And later on when her admirers like the poet, Christina Rossetti wanted to do a biography of her, there wasn't enough information to create a biography that would have brought her new readers and new generations as is what happened with Jane Austen.
Dana Taylor:
Samuel Johnson was a man who was given credit for either passages or even entire books written by some of these female authors. How did that happen?
Rebecca Romney:
Samuel Johnson was a giant of English letters in the 18th century, and he was friends with a number of the women in this book. And he supported their careers. He was of material assistance. He helped convince publishers to get certain novels published. He was a believer in the talent of these women. But what happened was he was so famous that his own fame detracted from their accomplishments. A great example of this is Hester Lynch Piozzi, who was one of Samuel Johnson's closest friends who's best known as Mrs. Thrale, which was during her first marriage when they were very close. She specifically says that she did not start publishing books until after Samuel Johnson's death, because she worried that her works would be attributed to him as the genius, that he helped her. She didn't want anyone to think that she had gotten his help in order to write her books.
In another case, there was a woman, Charlotte Lennox, who wrote an entire novel that was beloved at the time called The Female Quixote in 1752. And after both Johnson's and Lennox's deaths, critics started attributing the most famous chapter to Johnson for no reason except that it was a great chapter, and he was a friend and helper of Lennox. And the idea that if it's good, it must be by a man, is part of what perpetuated these slow deteriorations of these women's legacies.
Dana Taylor:
During Austen's time in history, some people considered women even reading to be inappropriate. You wrote that in addition to being bold enough to write, some of these authors fought against domestic abuse, patriarchal institutions and other threats women faced back then. Can you share a few of their stories?
Rebecca Romney:
Absolutely. Charlotte Smith is a great example of this. Charlotte Smith was married at the age of 15 to a man that was in an economic arrangement. They came from two wealthy families. Love had nothing to do with it. It was considered a good financial decision on both sides. The problem was that her husband was terrible. He was profligate, he was abusive, and he spent both sides of their fortune. So by the time she had 11 children, he was imprisoned for debt. That was a thing that could happen in the 18th century. You could be in prison for debt. So Charlotte Smith first started writing and publishing in order to make money to get him out of jail. And then after that point, when they had had 12 children, she finally left him. But she, in order to support her children, continued to write. So the novels that she wrote that Jane Austen loved, she only wrote in order to support herself and her children.
But the really frightening thing about it was that she couldn't divorce him because if she did, then her children would lose access to their inheritance through her father-in-law. So that was not a legal choice that she could make. But as a married woman, she did not have independent legal status, which meant that her husband could show up at any time at her publishers and demand the money that she had made from her writing. And she would legally be able to do nothing about it. So she spent her entire life essentially, almost financially on the run from her husband because he still had legal control over her and her children even after she had left him. And when you read Charlotte Smith's novels, you see these themes come out. Charlotte Smith specifically talks about how you should not get married young. You shouldn't just do it because it seems economically like a good idea. Those themes are themes that Austen picks up in books like Persuasion, and you can see these conversations between these two women across novels saying, "Protect yourself because the law will knock."
Dana Taylor:
It wasn't until the 20th century that critics began recognizing Jane Austen's notes of irony and sarcasm in her novels. You detail how humor is often transgressive and connected that to the continued discussion of whether women can be funny. How do you think the use of humor worked for and against these female writers?
Rebecca Romney:
A number of these women were incredibly comedic and funny writers. Even today reading them, I would stop and laugh. Elizabeth Inchbald, the playwright, she wrote comedies and they're very funny. A lot of one-liners that are still incredibly fresh and sparkling today. And the problem is that humor has an association with being transgressive. A lot of times we get humor through shock and surprise. But what is shocking and surprising that a man can say is very different than what can be shocking and surprising, that what a woman can say. Especially in the 18th century, when there was the cultural resistance of what we call propriety. That women should act only a certain way, that they shouldn't be brazen and bold, that they shouldn't be transgressive. And so the women who were most famous for their wit and for their comedy and for pushing the boundaries, those are the ones who were most likely to attract critics that didn't like them. And that's going to affect their reputation over the long term.
Dana Taylor:
Rebecca, you write about moments from your own life and how you grew up in your book too. How did your life experiences connect with the stories of these women?
Rebecca Romney:
That was one of the biggest surprises about reading these books is I thought I was going to read some maybe entertaining books, maybe not, but I was going to learn a lot more about Jane Austen. And what moved me so much about these books is that they felt relevant to me today. The book Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe is all about women's agency and control over her own life. It's a gothic horror novel. It's a kind of a thriller, and it's a page turner. It gets your pulse up. It's absolutely wonderful. And it's also tackling this theme of how a woman has control over her own life to make her own decisions. So what I kept on finding in these women was that there were parallels across time. These struggles, as we were talking about before, this idea of whether you can be bold and witty, and whether people accept that today. We still struggle with that today. I was called bossy as a child.
The story in the book is that my teacher had called me a strong leader, and the joke was what she meant was bossy. We had to take something that was a positive trait, but because I was a girl, they had to turn that into the negative trait of being bossy. So when I was reading about Charlotte Lennox being bold, I responded to that. There was something in these 18th century texts that still mattered to me today.
Dana Taylor:
Rebecca, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Rebecca Romney:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts @usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.