WILD FOR AUSTEN

News flash: There's more to Jane Austen than matchmaking and assembly balls.

As the author acknowledges on page 1, “Austen’s wildness has been part of the conversation about her and her writings for a very long time.” Looser’s justification for her deep dive into the “wild” aspects of Austen’s work, her relatives, and her afterlife in the culture is that “solid evidence” is needed to banish the stubbornly persistent image of her as “profoundly prim.” Literary scholars will hardly be surprised by the insights offered here, but as was the case in her biography of Austen’s contemporaries and fellow authors Jane and Maria Porter (Sister Novelists), Looser aims her work at the general public with a breezy, conversational tone, even as she flourishes her credentials as an Austen expert. Part 1 retells the plots of each novel, including unfinished ones and unpublished juvenilia, spotlighting Austen’s use of “wild,” “wildly,” and “wildest” and carefully explaining different connotations. Elizabeth Bennet’s muddy appearance after a brisk walk is described by the censorious Mrs. Hurst as “almost wild” (i.e., savage), while its more common use is as a synonym for “eager”; the young people in Persuasion are all “wild to see Lyme.” “Wildly” and “wildest” turn up most often in Sense and Sensibility to underscore Marianne’s dramatic nature. The focus on word use gets tedious, but in Part 2 Looser applies the notion of wildness more broadly to describe the adventures of Austen’s relatives—an aunt was tried for a capital felony, a cousin was married to a French count executed during the Reign of Terror—to make the point that, however quiet the writer’s life was, she had plenty of secondhand knowledge of the wider, wilder world. Part 3, “Shambolic Afterlives,” gets weird with chapters on Austen’s ghost, Austen erotica, and Austen films that were never made, but Janeites of an undemanding nature will enjoy it all.

Hyperfocused and not exactly groundbreaking, but well informed and fun for die-hard fans.