ENCOUNTERS WITH JANE AUSTEN

Robson collects writings about and inspired by the iconic English novelist.

Few writers have seen their work reinterpreted as much as Jane Austen’s. “We all encounter Austen differently and from the position of where and when we read her,” writes the scholar Jennie Batchelor in the book’s introduction. “How we read her changes as the world changes around us.” This anthology, a melange of fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews, reflects the diversity of reactions to Austen’s work. Katherine Reay writes of the healing experience of reading the novelist while recovering from a severe injury, while Katie Lumsden discusses the pleasure of rereading Austen’s novels over and over at different stages in her life. Fiction pieces imagine the author and her characters in new, often revisionary arrangements; in Julia Miller’s “Georgiana Darcy—Pistols at Dawn,” Pride and Prejudice’s Georgiana Darcy exacts satisfaction from the gold-digger George Wickham in the form of a duel, while in Charlie Lovett’s novel excerpt “First Impressions,” Austen defends herself against the accusation that she has “a too highly developed interest in fictionalizing [her] acquaintances.” (One particularly meta piece is an Austen update written by actress and novelist Talulah Riley, who starred in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film adaptation.) Interviewees include Jeff James, the director who brought Persuasion to the stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, and Martin Jennings, the sculptor who created a bronze sculpture of Austen for Winchester Cathedral. Numerous poets contribute poems, including “Witch-Wife” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, about a woman who “was not made for any man, / And she never will be all mine.” The range of the contributors leaves the reader with a sense of how important Austen is to writers in particular, who see in her not simply an antecedent or role model but as an old friend who, with constancy and wit, is always there during those transitional moments in life—the very moments that Austen herself wrote about with such precision.

A loving tribute to a legendary author whose work continues to resonate in the current day.