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Publication Date
3-10-2026
Description
Jane Austen has more readers today than at any time in history. Many of Austen’s legions of fans, however, came to her novels after first seeing films or other adaptations made for twenty-first-century audiences. Austen herself conversely spent her literary career undermining romantic clichés and rethinking novel conventions. Confident that she and her contemporaries shared a common reading culture, Austen deliberately constructed her novels to set readerly expectations, only to disrupt or confound those expectations by challenging her readers’ assumptions and values. In Reading with Jane Austen, Elaine Bander carefully rereads the great author’s novels—beginning with her late work of juvenilia, “Catharine, or The Bower,” and ending with her final fragment, “Sanditon”—against the rich context of late Georgian literary and intellectual culture. In doing so, Bander invites us into the transformative experience that Austen intentionally designed for her earliest readers, adding new layers of appreciation for those who love her work.
Keywords
Jane Austen, “Catharine, or the Bower”, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, First Impressions, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, “Sanditon”, Jane Austen’s Letters, Regency novel, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Cecilia, or, Memoirs of an Heiress, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, juvenilia, Robert Burns, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Edward Denham, Humphrey Repton, William Gilpin, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Female Quixote, marriage-plot, courtship novels, novel heroines, heroine, reading practices, Georgian literature, adaptations, Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, Mrs. Smith, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Lord Nelson, Janeites
Rights
Copyright © 2026 by Elaine Bander
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684485857