"Whether you're new to Austen's work or know it backwards and forwards already, this book provides a clear, full and highly engaging account of how Austen's fiction works and why it matters. Exploring new pathways into the study of Jane Austen's writing, novelist and academic Jenny Davidson looks at Austen's work through a writer's lens, addressing formal questions about narration, novel writing, and fictional composition as well as themes including social and women's history, morals and manners. Introducing new readers to the breadth and depth of Jane Austen's writing, and offering new insights to those more familiar with Austen's work, Jenny Davidson celebrates the art and skill of one of the most popular and influential writers in the history of English literature"--

"The topic of how we respond to books we love, as well as how that affects the critical discourse about them, has become a legitimate object of study in its own right, with Austen as a central example; though Shakespeare might be the most closely comparable instance in the English literary tradition, certain other authors undoubtedly continue to elicit curiously strong allegiances from unusually large numbers of readers (the three quite different names of J.R.R. Tolkien, Ayn Rand and Toni Morrison come immediately to mind). I strongly believe that rather than canceling each other out, a productive tension exists between the different modes involved in loving books and in reading them to understand how they work, what they mean and why they matter, not least because both orientations depend heavily on the practice of repeated rereading, even or perhaps especially in the case of books we already know very well"--