Book Reviews from JASNA News
Each issue of JASNA News includes reviews of books about Jane Austen, her writing, and her era. Publishers and authors who wish to submit a book for review are requested to contact the Book Review Editor, Sue Parrill, sparrill@bellsouth.net, and provide a copy of each book.
The reviews for Winter, 2008 and after require Adobe Acrobat. The others are text pages.
The text of all book reviews on this site can be searched online.
Spring 2010 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen’s Sewing Box
- The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet
- Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict
- Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman
- The Compleat Housewife: or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion
Winter 2009 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love
- So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in “Pride and Prejudice”
- The Immortal Jane Austen
- Austen’s Emma (A Continuum Reader’s Guide)
Summer 2009 Book Reviews:
- Women Writers and Old Age in Britain, 1750-1850
- The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England
- A Celebration of Frances Burney
- Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot
Spring 2009 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists
- Acting Like a Lady
- Twilight
- The Matters at Mansfield and Lydia Bennet’s Story
Winter 2008 Book Reviews:
- Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending
- Critical Companion to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work
- The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe
- Jane Austen out of the blue
- Privilege and Scandal: The Remarkable Life of Harriet Spencer, Sister of Georgiana
Summer 2008 Book Reviews:
- Cambridge Edition of Sense and Sensibility
- The Letters of Mrs Lefroy: Jane Austen’s Beloved Friend
- The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen and Mrs. Elton in America
- Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres
- Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues
Spring 2008 Book Reviews:
- A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion
- Emma Adapted—Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film
- The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade
- Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man
- Literary Genius: 35 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature
Winter 2007 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or, Love, Death, and the SATs
- Jane Austen: A Students’ Guide to the Later Manuscript Works
- Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition: ‘a fling at the slave trade’
- Jane Austen for Dummies
- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, a novel
Summer 2007 Book Reviews:
- Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen
- Fugitive Pieces: Trifles Light as Air: The Poems of James Edward Austen-Leigh
- Jane and His Lordship’s Legacy, Suspense and Sensibility (Or, First Impressions Revisited), North by Northanger (Or, The Shades of Pemberley)
- Cambridge Edition of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia
- James Stanier Clarke
Spring 2007 Book Reviews:
- A Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family
- Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood
- Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction
- Jane Austen’s Juvenilia: Jack & Alice, Lady Susan, The Three Sisters
Winter 2006 Book Reviews:
- Cambridge Edition of Mansfield Park
- Jane Austen in Context
- Life in the Country: With Quotations by Jane Austen and Silhouettes by her Nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh
- Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style
Summer 2006 Book Reviews:
- Cambridge Edition of Emma
- Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House
- The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf
- Austen Juvenilia: Frederic and Elfrida, The History of England, Catharine or The Bower
- Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues
Spring 2006 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
- Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust
- Jane Austen in the Classroom: Viewing the Novel/Reading the Film
- Jane Austen in Boca
- All Things Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World
Winter 2005 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets
- Jane Austen’s Brother Abroad: The Grand Tour Journals of Edward Austen
- Searching for Jane Austen
- Sex and Sensibility, Dating Mr. Darcy
- Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece
Summer 2005 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd edition
- Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma
- Jane Austen and Crime
- A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen
Spring 2005 Book Reviews:
- Tea with Jane Austen
- Jane Austen on Screen
- Annotated Pride and Prejudice
- The Complete Poems of James Austen, Jane Austen’s Eldest Brother
- Emma; or, The Unfortunate Attachment: A Sentimental Novel
Winter 2004 Book Reviews:
- Effusions of Fancy
- The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature From Austen to Woolf
- Gothic Editions, The Monk and Northanger Abbey
- In the Steps of Jane Austen: Walking Tours of Austen’s England
- The Talk in Jane Austen
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Summer 2004 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style
- Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels
- The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith
- Jane Austen and the Theatre
- The Jane Austen Book Club
Spring 2004 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture
- Jane Austen’s Regency World
- The Historical Austen
- “All This Reading”: The Literary World of Barbara Pym
- I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald
Winter 2003 Book Reviews:
- Becoming Jane Austen
- The Reform’d Coquet, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplish’d Rake
- Jane Austen Fashion: Fashion and Needlework in the Works of Jane Austen
- Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen
- Mastering the Novels of Jane Austen
Summer 2003 Book Reviews:
- Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen
- Jane Austen’s “Outlandish Cousin”: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide
- In A Fast Coach With A Pretty Woman: Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson
- Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England
- Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations
Spring 2003 Book Reviews:
- Romantic Austen
- Where’s Where in Jane Austen...and What Happens There
- Jane Austen and Names
- Jane Austen and the Theatre
- Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman
- Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel
- Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers
Winter 2002 Book Reviews:
- Soldier of the Raj: The Life of Richard Purvis, 1789-1868, Soldier, Sailor, and Parson
- A Year with Jane Austen, A Calendar for 2002
- Pride and Prejudice and The Recess
- Jane Austen: Antipodean Views
Summer 2002 Book Reviews:
- Sense and Sensibility - two new editions
- The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing
- The Tailor’s Masterpiece and Hints on Etiquette
- The Injur’d Husband and Lasselia
Spring 2002 Book Reviews:
- I, Jane Austen
- Jane Austen in Hollywood and Recreating Jane Austen
- Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction and A Century of Wills from Jane Austen’s Family, 1705 - 1806
- Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Fiction
Winter 2001 Book Reviews:
- Student Companion to Jane Austen
- Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century “Women’s Fiction” and Social Engagement
- General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study in Dialogism
- Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1839: Stress Points in English Augustan Tradition and The Poetics of Novels: Fiction and its Execution
Summer 2001 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality
- Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art
- Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen
- British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820
- Jane Austen
- Jane Austen and the Navy
- Jane and Her Gentlemen
- Invitation to the Party
Winter 2000 Book Reviews:
- Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees
- Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
- The Friendly Jane Austen: A Well Mannered Introduction to a Lady of Sense & Sensibility
- Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities
- Jane Austen: A Celebration
- Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
Summer 2000 Book Reviews:
- Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen
- Critical Essays on Jane Austen
- By A Lady: Jane Austen’s Female Archetypes in Fiction and Film
Spring 2000 Book Reviews:
- Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time
- Jane Austen and the Interplay of Character
- Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen
- A Closer Walk With God: Christian Insights from the Novels of Jane Austen
- The Jane Austen Quiz Book
Winter 1999 Book Reviews:
- The Author’s Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel
- Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion
- Jane Austen, a volume in The British Library Writers’ Lives series
- The Politics of Jane Austen
- A Transcription and Analysis of Jane Austen’s Last Work, Sanditon
- The Regency Underworld and An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England
Summer 1999 Book Reviews:
- Almost Another Sister: Fanny Knight, Jane Austen’s Favourite Niece
- Jane Austen in Hollywood
- Austen for All Ages (four books from the Juvenilia and a Collection of Letters)
- Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists
- The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
- A Jane Austen Encyclopedia
Spring 1999 Book Reviews:
- The Hearth of the Matter (three books on women’s roles in Austen’s time)
- Reshaping the Sexes in Sense and Sensibility
- Cambridge University Press’s edition of Pride and Prejudice
- The Making of Jane Austen’s Emma and Jane Austen’s Emma on Television
- Titles and Forms of Address
Winter 1998 Book Reviews:
- How to Study an Austen Novel and Understanding Pride and Prejudice
- Imagining Characters: Conversations About Women Writers
- Dancing Through Time: Western Social Dance in Literature, 1400-1918: Selections
- The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s and Gardener’s Companion
- British Women Writers, 1700-1850: An Annotated Bibliography of Their Works and Works About Them