Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

I, like the author, love Jane Austen. Unlike her, I know nothing about the world of rare books, and while I know only slightly more now than before I read this book, I have a better understanding of what draws people not just ot the book itself, but to those who read this exact volume before one picks it up. She asks the question about who might have influenced Austen and the answer is that there were quite a few women authors who wrote in the late 18th and early 19th century and who clearly Austen read because she mentions them by name in her letters to her siblings and in some cases because she has lifted things out of their books to make her own. It is a wonder someone hasn’t thought before to do a little detective work into the authors that influenced her: Ann Radcliffe, whose 1794 gothic thriller The Mysteries of Udolpho peppers every other conversation in Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Inchbald, whose 1798 play Lovers’ Vows is rehearsed by the characters in Mansfield Park; and Frances Burney, whose third novel, Camilla (1796), originated the phrase “pride and prejudice”. The interesting thing is not that they exist but more that they have been largely forgotten. I was able to find their hallmark works through the Guttenberg project and in the Kindle library, and will uspdate later as I read through some of them, but this author thinks that they are worthy. In addition to the above, she found Fanny Burney’s Evelina to be bold and witty, Charlotte Lennox, whose The Female Quixote" is witty and smart, to Elizabeth Inchbald, whose concise and ironic style may have influenced Austen as well. It is great fun to read this.