The Women Who Inspired Jane Austen

Jane Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work. So where had these women gone? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

In Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, rare book dealer Rebecca Romney investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. In this excerpt, we learn how the project began.

Introduction

“You see, but you do not observe.”
—Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia”

It all started with a book that made me curious. I was on a house call in Georgetown, invited to browse the personal book collection of a woman who used to be a professional rare book dealer like me. In the tree-dappled sunlight that filtered through the windows, I spent the afternoon combing through her library. As the wind grazed the branches outside, the light within the room shifted, sparkling across the antique rug, the gently worn furniture, and the bookcases. Every shelf had been filled with books that quietly spoke to her discernment. Instead of a flashy modern edition of Pride and Prejudice, this woman had a rather ugly one, bound in drab brown paper boards resembling dilapidated cardboard. It also bore an unusual revised title, Elizabeth Bennet; or, Pride and Prejudice. Despite its humble appearance, I knew the book was incredibly rare. It was the first edition of Pride and Prejudice published in the United States, from 1832. A woman who kept this book on her shelf knew a good book when she saw it, even if others around her might overlook it.

Jane Austen is one of my favorite writers. She was born in 1775 in the English countryside, Steventon, Hampshire, and went on to become “the first great woman writer in English,” according to one of her many modern biographers. She wrote six major novels, along with a novella, two other incomplete novels, and what scholars call juvenilia (early writing she composed when she was growing up). I have always been drawn to Austen’s confidence, how she guides the reader through her heroines’ struggles and uncertainties. And I like her wit, which shines in the details she chooses to linger on. Austen died fairly young, at the age of forty-one, and I have often wished that she had lived to write more.

But on that house call, it wasn’t Pride and Prejudice that made me curious. I have handled many different editions of Austen’s books over the years, including a wide variety of nineteenth-century ones. We would certainly purchase this copy. It was another shelf that drew my eye, one lined with a series of books that had been published during the 1890s and early 1900s by Macmillan in London, recognizable because of their stunning emerald green cloth bindings and elaborate gilt spines. I took one glance and knew we’d make an offer on the entire collection. Offer accepted, we boxed up our acquisitions to transport back to the shop. The book that would change my life was lying within.

_________________________

A few months later, I sat at my desk and opened my laptop, ready to spend a few hours cataloging new acquisitions. Before a book is offered for sale, we rare book dealers record its physical attributes: Is it bound in cloth? Leather? Does it have any damage? Signs of previous ownership? We also often write a brief summary of its importance, drawing on the work of other experts in our field and surrounding fields—not just literary critics and biographers, but also book historians, or scholars who study the history of the book. We call the result a catalog description, which becomes our official documentation for that rare book.

On that day, I had plenty of options for which book I would catalog first. I am a maker of piles: this stack has books I’ve cataloged but not yet put online; that stack contains a few volumes I’ve pulled for our next newsletter of new arrivals; yet another stack came from that Georgetown house call. I looked toward the last stack of books. Three volumes down from the top sat a novel called Evelina by Frances Burney.

I had seen Burney’s name before, mostly on the spines of books at antiquarian book fairs in the UK. But I couldn’t recall any details of her life. I certainly hadn’t read any of her books. I had purchased this one primarily for the emerald-green cloth binding. Not all books are collected because they are first editions. Some are collected for their beauty. This one dated from 1903, a period when UK and US publishers commissioned artists to design eye-catching cloth bindings as a marketing tool (this, before dust jackets rose to dominance). The front board featured a woman poised with a quill pen, dressed in voluminous skirts and a plumed hat. She stood beneath a tree, clusters of leaves spreading across nearly half the binding, all stamped in gilt upon that rich, emerald-green background. Just like it had in the library in Georgetown, when the light hit it just right, it sparkled.

I have no problem admitting that I’ve bought books for their covers. But even when I do, I care about the story in the book—and the story of the book. I want to know what the book is about. What happens? How was it different than the stories that came before? How was it similar? I want to know about the author. Who was she? How did she come to be a writer? I want to know about the book itself. How was it made? What does that say about its publisher’s view of its target audience? I want to know about the book’s publication. What did people think about it then? What do they think of it now? I want to know where it has been. Who owned this book? How did they care for it (or not)? Why was it saved for so long? To be a rare book dealer is to appreciate that the book itself—the object—can be as interesting as its text.

I’ve made a career out of that curiosity. I like to ask questions, approaching books like a detective. My job is to investigate each book’s story, its importance. When I present my findings, I anticipate interrogation for every statement, as if a judge were leaning over my shoulder asking, “What’s your evidence?” If I call a book a first edition, what’s my evidence? If I say this book is rare, how do I know? If I call an author influential, where’s my source? I take pride in doing work that Sherlock Holmes would compliment. So how was I to catalog this book by an author I knew nothing about? I pulled down a stack of reference books from my shelves.

I quickly gathered that Evelina was Burney’s first and most famous novel, published to acclaim in 1778. Then, with my finger keeping my place in one reference book while I used my other hand to flip through another, I ran across something electric. If my job is to investigate a book’s importance, a detail like this becomes the star evidence in my case.

This is the moment I savor. I chase this feeling across auctions, in book fairs from London to San Francisco, through labyrinths of institutional special collections and private libraries, and on the pages in reference books.

The star evidence: the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Burney’s second novel, Cecilia (1782). Frances Burney, it turns out, had been one of Austen’s favorite authors. She wrote courtship novels very like Austen’s, focused on young heroines navigating the difficulties of finding love. Or rather, Austen wrote books very like hers: Burney was one of the most successful novelists of Austen’s lifetime. I’d had no idea. Me, a reader and re-reader of Austen’s work over decades. I had overlooked this important English author, one with deep significance to another I admired. In spite of my supposed professional curiosity, I realized I had missed something. And it stung.

In the Sherlock Holmes short story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the detective famously scolds Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” After Evelina crossed my desk (or rather, sat for months in that pile, stacked between Gulliver’s Travels and The Compleat Angler), I returned to Austen’s books and began to observe new traits in them. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of the gothic writer Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes so much controversy in Mansfield Park is in fact a real one adapted by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. I was picking up on clues, sprinkled about in the works of Austen like bread crumbs, that pointed toward the women writers she admired. I returned to Austen’s books and began to observe new traits in them.

Why hadn’t I noticed these authors before? I had researched the rise of the English novel for my job (and, who am I kidding, because I enjoyed it). The authors whom Austen referenced in her work had barely entered that discourse. Baffled, I headed to my bookshelf and pulled off a 2005 book on the English novel written for students “by one of the world’s leading literary theorists,” as the back panel assured me. I opened the first page. The period when Austen did most of her formative reading “was one of the most fertile, diverse, and adventurous periods of novel-writing in English history,” the author asserted—for one more paragraph, before moving straight to Austen and Walter Scott. The previous chapter had examined Laurence Sterne. I stared at the ceiling and did the math. Tristram Shandy’s last volume was published in 1767. Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, came in 1811. Forty-four years. Simply skipped.

Austen read William Shakespeare, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson, all authors I had read. She also read Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth, all authors I hadn’t. They were part of Austen’s bookshelf, but they had disappeared entirely from mine—and largely from that Leading Literary Theorist’s bookshelf as well. It was unsettling to realize I had read so many of the men on Austen’s bookshelf, but none of the women. Critical authorities like this one had provided the foundation for my understanding the past. But something was wrong. There was a crack in the foundation. I began to feel unsteady.

The feeling was all the more unsettling because this type of knowledge is central to what I do as a rare book dealer. “It is my business to know what other people do not know,” as the ever-quotable Sherlock Holmes says. For instance: the first edition in English of Grimms’ fairy tales contains a typo on the title page because the British printers forgot an umlaut on a German word; an adventure novel in Spanish called El Anacronópete (1887) describes a time machine eight years before the book most believe was the first to do so, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine; publisher Frederick Warne’s edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) isn’t the true first edition, but was preceded in 1901 by a run of a few hundred copies that Beatrix Potter printed privately as gifts for friends. Literary trivia is my joy and my currency. Besides the ability to quote the Great Detective in nearly any situation, I can also tell you how many steps led to his flat at 221B; I can recite Sappho in Greek and Horace in Latin; I have participated in public readings of Ulysses; and I have seriously considered getting a tattoo of a Catullus verse. Yet I had completely missed some of Austen’s major predecessors. I’ve read swaths of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary—pages upon pages of eighteenth-century lexical entries—but I assumed these women writers from the same period weren’t worth my time.

The game was afoot (and no, I won’t stop quoting Holmes). When I investigated further, I learned that Austen had done all this reading during the first time in English history when more women published novels than men. Yet in my own reading, I had skipped them so entirely that it seemed almost intentional. And it was: the critics who shaped our modern idea of the novel in English so frequently dismissed women writers that the systematic excising has a name. It’s called the Great Forgetting. Only Austen survived that period, becoming “the first great woman writer in English”—even though there is a passage in one of her own novels that explicitly celebrated the work of women writers who had come before her. Austen gave me a hint of my mistake in Northanger Abbey, as well as how I might correct it:

while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name.

In this passage, Austen had already recognized a mechanism of the Great Forgetting: “a thousand pens” talk of works like Milton’s Paradise Lost, while embarrassed to admit to reading novels. Austen felt no such shame. Novels display some of “the greatest powers of the mind,” she argued. And then she gave examples. Cecilia (1782) was Frances Burney’s second novel; Camilla (1796) was her third. Belinda (1801) was the second novel of another woman writer, Maria Edgeworth.

About the author

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, D.C. She is the rare books specialist on the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade The Booksellers. Romney is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with J. P. Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more.