Jane Austen Gifts on Her 250th Birthday
By Stuart Mitchner
Jane Austen (1775-1817) and John Keats (1795-1821) have birthdays in 2025, her 250th, his 230th. Among the most appreciated Christmas presents I ever gave my wife was a set of Jane Austen novels with elaborate gilt-embellished covers and color plates by C.E. Brock (J.M. Dent London, 1909).
Austen Contains Multitudes
While there will always be a market for Keats (on our first Christmas, my wife gave me a boxed set of his letters that I’ve kept close at hand ever since), the market for Austen, with apologies to Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, contains multitudes, and on the occasion of her 250th, the Austen industry has gone into overdrive. The list on regency-explorer.net/jane 250 numbers well over 100 books, including a number in other languages. I’m reminded of the critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019), who asserted “That like Shakespeare, Austen invented us. Because we are Austen’s children, we behold and confront our own anguish and our own fantasies in her novels.” Pointing out how “the strong selves” of Jane Austen’s heroines attest to her “reserves of power,” Bloom imagines that “had she not died so soon, she would have been capable of creating a Shakespearean diversity of persons, despite her narrowly limited social range of representation.”
If you’re looking for diversity with a capital D, here’s a small sample, minus authors and publishers, from the regency-explorer list: A Jane Austen Year: Celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen; Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and The Radical; Jane Austen in 41 Objects; If Jane Austen Spoke the Language of Gen Z: Pride and Prejudice in the Present Day; Nonbinary Jane Austen; Go Ask Austen: Life Lessons from Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice and Puzzles; The Jane Austen Insult Guide for Well-Bred Women: Serving Tea with a Side Of Scorn; Six Weeks by the Sea: The Summer Jane Austen Fell in Love; The Complete Jane Austen Movie Guide; and Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane.
Austen at War
When I entered graduate school at Rutgers, I planned to focus on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama, yet it was my delivery of a paper on Austen that helped me pass my orals. The book that sealed my fate was Northanger Abbey, the first novel she ever sold to a publisher (Crosby & Co. for £10 in 1803); from the start she was vividly present in her heroine Catherine Morland, who grew up with “neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome,” was “noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.”
I was especially struck by how commandingly Austen makes her presence felt early in the narrative, suddenly speaking directly to the reader in mid-paragraph while describing Catherine’s meetings with Isabella Thorpe “in defiance of wet and dirt” to “read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust …. I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.”
Great enemies, contempt, censure, harsh epithets, injured bodies — it sounds like war, with the novelist as the heroine. And take note of the way she anticipates the future with her reference to “any other literary corporation.”
Since the publisher’s negligence gave Austen time to revise the manuscript right up to the last year of her life, it’s possible that these passages are the work of an older, wiser writer. Yet there’s something admirably youthfully, naively bold in the warmth and force of the outburst, capped by the chapter-ending acclamation, which she begins by taking issue with “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.” After suggesting a hypothetical exchange in which one person is asked, “What are you reading?” and answers, “Only a novel,” Jane takes the cue: “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.”
Closer Looks
The first book on the Regency list, A Jane Austen Year: Celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen (Pitkin, 2025) is published in partnership with the curators of Jane Austen’s House, the Hampshire cottage in Chawton that attracts thousands of visitors every year. Since this big, lavishly illustrated volume qualifies as a “coffee table book,” it would seem to be an ideal gift for Austen fans. According to the publisher, it covers “a calendar year, from snowy scenes in January to festive recipes in December,” as “specially commissioned photography of Austen’s home and possessions are brought together with extracts from her books, reproductions of her letters, and stories of her life throughout the seasons. Highlights include the first time Austen read a published copy of Pride and Prejudice to an enraptured audience in her drawing room, affectionate letters to her sister Cassandra reproduced in full, and an exquisite miniature portrait of Tom Lefroy, the man she nearly married.”
Kathyrn Sutherland’s Jane Austen in 41 Objects (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2025) appears to be another ready-made gift book. The Sunday Times calls it “Riveting, gorgeously illustrated…. The great advantage of Sutherland’s pick and mix approach is that it allows us the buried stories, side angles, and overlooked corners that get squeezed out in more conventional treatments of Austen’s life.” Jane Austen’s Regency World suggests that “this meticulously researched little book provides a fresh perspective on the writer’s life: rather than examining relationships, background, life events, even her writing, Sutherland chooses to approach her subject via ‘little biographies of objects that crossed her path in life and afterwards.’… Around these objects, Sutherland creates a delicate biographical narrative, alongside fascinating insights into Austen’s world and legacy via the perfectly chosen objects.”
Introducing Go Ask Austen: Life Lessons from Jane Austen (Smith Street Books 2025) by Violet DeWhitt, with illustrations by George Saad, the publisher plays on Austen’s most famous sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that most of us could use some guidance. Whether readers are looking to marry a man with several carriages to his name, recovering from an illness caused by wet stockings, or unsure what color ribbon is the best match for an outfit, Jane Austen’s wisdom is here to guide them through any problem…. Not sure of the right decision? ‘Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.’ Unsure what to do with an afternoon? ‘To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.’”
Wild for Jane
Judged solely by its title, Devoney Looser’s Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane (St. Martin’s Press 2025) sounds promisingly in synch with the qualities that drew me into Austen’s orbit around the time I bought my wife’s Christmas present at John Socia’s Old York Bookshop in New Brunswick. A set of books that would have been beyond my graduate student means was affordable thanks to that most generous of booksellers.
Perhaps the best reviewed new book released in Austen’s anniversary year is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University Looser’s “irreverent and loving take on the iconic Austen” (Booklist). Says Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me: “Jane the prim and proper is laid to rest here, so that Jane the satirist, Jane the subversive, Jane the wild can rise and make her trouble. This reading of all her work, some of her biography and family history, and many of the reactions — as criticism, as movies, as fandom — gallops along, as exhilarating as it is illuminating. Devoney Looser is a superb interpreter and astonishingly erudite scholar of all things Austen, and she brings her expertise to bear deftly, amusingly, informatively, leaving us with an Austen who’s ready to roll.”
Twain On Jane
One thing that drew me to the passionate, volatile, antithesis of the stuffy stereotype was Mark Twain’s notorious statement, “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Perhaps readers of the highly acclaimed new biography of Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin 2025) will find a more thoughtful assessment of the author of Mansfield Park, whose 14-year-old heroine was “noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness” and was happier playing “cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country” than reading books. Sounds like a girlish preview of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like me, you may wonder about Catherine Morland playing baseball a century in advance of the National Pastime. Still, as hard as it is to imagine a Jane Austen heroine swinging a bat, running the bases, and sliding home in a pinafore, “baseball” is the word employed in all subsequent editions, and there are already blogs headed “Jane Austen Invented Baseball,” where fans match hometown players with characters in her novels. I get it. Like Harold Bloom, we want Jane to be cosmically applicable to all things both great and small, mundane, modern, or marvelous, and the wilder, more unconfined and unladylike the better.
