What would Jane do?

While Jane Austen was admired during her lifetime, she is much more popular today, and her many fans have a healthy appetite for books about her: biographies, memoirs tracing her influence on the author’s life, sequels of her novels—to say nothing of the film and television adaptations. You can expect even more this year, as the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth arrives in December. Two new but very different books have already started the celebration. Hard-core Janeites as well as more casual readers of Austen’s fiction will enjoy them both.

In Living With Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 246 pp.), British scholar and novelist Janet Todd has written a conversational consideration of Austen’s writings—her novels, letters, and juvenilia—and the part those works have played in Todd’s own life. Todd had a long and distinguished career in academia. She was president of Lucy Cavendish College of the University of Cambridge, wrote biographies of Austen and other major writers, served as general editor for a scholarly edition of Austen’s works, and has written two novels inspired by Austen. Befitting that background, Todd builds this short book around topics that could easily have suited a scholarly paper, but her tone is far more inviting and her writing free of impenetrable jargon. 

Todd aptly calls her book “desultory.” She moves easily from thoughtful consideration of Austen’s passages and characters into reveries of her own peripatetic childhood and academic career. It meanders quite a bit, sometimes into dead ends (a non sequitur about umbrellas would have been a good footnote) but very often along scenic paths. In one chapter, she considers bodily concerns and ailments as expressed by Austen and Wollstonecraft, and as experienced by Todd in her own life. There are discussions of death in Austen’s writing, and Austen’s own death; also of Austen’s depiction of nature, of conversation, of instruction.

At its best, Todd’s book reconsiders overlooked plot details or character traits, or shows surprising links between the novels, such as the shared inspirations for Northanger Abbey, which Austen wrote in the late 1790s (though it wasn’t published until after her death), and Sanditon, which she left incomplete in 1817. Todd is especially good at unpacking Austen’s letters and does a masterful job of situating Austen within the context of her times, discussing her writing and ideas alongside those of her more philosophical and feminist predecessor Wollstonecraft, or explaining how the ideas of the landscape architect William Gilpin shaped Pemberley.

Sometimes Todd is subtly provocative, as when she challenges conventional understandings of beloved characters like Emma and Mr. Darcy or gently questions feminist readings of the novels. She admits that whereas she once believed Austen held “liberal, internationalist views,” she now sees an English patriotism in the novels and letters—not surprising, considering one of Austen’s brothers was a militia officer and two others served in the Royal Navy. And although the Anglican Church plays a role in the novels, Todd claims that in Austen’s letters “the Church emerges as a way of life, of experiencing life. … It’s a very ‘moderate’ seasonal English way of being religious.”

Todd does not make sweeping arguments. She offers thoughtful observations that are sometimes only loosely connected. Rebecca Romney takes a very different approach in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest To Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, 464 pp.). Romney sets out to solve a mystery: Why have the women writers Austen admired fallen into obscurity? To answer that question, Romney reads the work of eight women Austen herself mentions in her own writing. Among these forgotten forerunners are the undisputed queen of the Gothic novel, Anne Radcliffe; the witty novelist of manners, Frances Burney; and the novelist and poet Charlotte Smith, who used the money from her sonnet collections to pay off the debts incurred by her good-for-nothing husband.

Romney’s chapters follow a consistent pattern: She doesn’t expect much from any of the authors but is pleasantly surprised every time (with one exception, as we’ll see). Eventually, she realizes that perceiving these women merely as Austen’s influences did them a great ­disservice; they were excellent artists in their own right, and in some ways even superior to their more famous descendant. “Austen paints with a smaller ­palette than Burney,” Romney asserts. “She is not as moving as Radcliffe. She is less daring than [Charlotte] Lennox. … Does this change my love for Austen? Of course not.” The only writer of the bunch Romney does not enjoy reading is the evangelical Hannah More, who reminds her too much of what she considers the stifling religious voices of her youth. Though Romney does eventually admire More’s conservative brand of feminism, I was surprised she wasn’t more impressed by More’s considerable work to abolish the slave trade.

Just as Todd’s book includes many insights into her career as an academic and her itinerant youth, so Romney’s own life features prominently here. A rare book collector (you may have seen her on the History Channel’s Pawn Stars), Romney shares fascinating details of her trade and narrates her quests for editions of books by the women she writes about. This gives Jane Austen’s Bookshelf an intriguing subplot. Romney’s expertise leads to interesting discoveries about when and why particular reputations declined, though I didn’t always find her interpretations convincing. Considering the waning of Radcliffe’s acclaim, she suggests Walter Scott had criticized her as a response to William Wordsworth’s complaint that Scott himself was “of the Radcliffe school.” Scott, Romney suggests, was trying to establish distance for the sake of his own reputation. It’s an interesting theory, but the letter in which Wordsworth made this comparison was not published until long after Scott had died.

Romney describes her work as being in the “tradition of feminist recovery,” yet you don’t have to be a feminist to agree that the authors she discusses deserve our attention. (In my former life as an English professor, I assigned works by most of these authors.) She winds up developing “a more expansive view of the canon” not because what we understand as the collection of Great Books is not great, but because it necessarily omits many excellent works (certainly) and because the authorities behind it have rejected worthy books for bad reasons (debatable). She often attributes the criticisms and dismissals and disappearances of these writers to sexism. There is no doubt that was often a factor, but it strikes me as too simplistic an explanation given how many once-beloved male authors have fallen into comparable obscurity. Posthumous literary reputations are unpredictable things.

—Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read) is being published in May.