 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with "book" in the title, or two or more books on the cover.
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney. This book added far too many titles to my TBR list. The author noted a decades-long gap in the canon of books commonly taught in school, from the late 1700s through the early 1800s when Austen emerged. This is exactly the period when novels became popular, and most of them were written by women. Austen's biographers frequently describe her being influenced by Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare, yet brush past the female authors that Austen herself mentioned in her books and letters. When Romney noted the phrase "pride and prejudice" in a Frances Burney novel, she began researching Austen's predecessors. The book delves into eight women writers, giving brief biographies and a discussion of their work. (Being a rare book dealer, Romney also waxes lyrical about covers and bindings; I'll admit to skimming those parts.) Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth wrote the sort of realistic novels that Austen perfected in Pride and Prejudice. Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels were compared with Shakespeare in her day; the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey is obsessed with Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen's Mansfield Park includes the characters staging a performance of Elizabeth Inchbald's Lover's Vows; Austen clearly assumed the play was familiar to her readers. The one book mentioned that I recognized was Charlotte Lennox's Arabella, or the Female Quixote, about a young woman who confuses romantic novels with reality. Austen updated this plot in Northanger Abbey. These authors were once household names, influencing both male and female authors who followed. (Charles Dickens, for instance, was a major fan of Maria Edgeworth.) To understand how they were erased from the canon, Romney turns to Joanna Russ's brilliant How to Suppress Women's Writing. Every phenomenon that Russ mentions is applicable here. Radcliffe's Gothic novels were deemed a lesser genre, dismissed the same way romance novels are today. Burney and Edgeworth were pronounced inferior to Austen, as if only the single "best" exemplar of a genre was allowed (at least for women). Elizabeth Inchbald's works were called immoral (a charge that carries more weight against women authors). Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi was mostly discussed for her unconventional life instead of her works. A magazine floated an unsupported theory that the climactic chapter of The Female Quixote was authored by Charlotte Lennox's friend Samuel Johnson; this claim continued to be quoted long after it was thoroughly debunked. When Joanna Russ wrote How to Suppress Women's Writing in 1983, there were no ebooks or internet to find out-of-print books. In reading Russ and others, Romney realizes that she, like Austen, fits into a tradition that others began. Romney quotes Russ's challenge at the end: "I've been trying to finish this monster for 13 ms. pages and it won't. Clearly it's not finished. You finish it."
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