It would be easy to mistake Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf for one of the many books produced annually by the Jane Austen industrial-entertainment complex: Jane Austen at Home, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, Jane Was Here: An illustrated Guide to Jane Austen’s England. So much cultural real estate has been built off those six published books of Austen’s, it’s 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”. “There are two Traits in her Character which are pleasing,” Austen once wrote of a friend, “namely she admires Camilla, & drinks no cream in her Tea.”
To her chagrin, Romney had not even heard of Burney, despite being a self-confessed Austen fanatic and a rare book dealer to boot, but she soon found she was not alone. Burney is not even mentioned on Austen’s Wikipedia page and merits only dismissive mentions in most histories of the period, such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), which concluded, condescendingly, “it was Jane Austen who completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun”. And this despite the Georgian era being the first time in English history more women published novels than men. It wasn’t that Burney wasn’t any good, it was that she wasn’t as good as Austen, even though Richardson or Fielding are never asked to pass the same test. “When Burney loses, that’s it: she’s off those canonical reading lists,” writes Romney, crisply. “Between women writers, you have to beat the best or you don’t get to play at all.”
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf is brilliant stuff – a bold bit of canon jujitsu, sparked by the simplest of questions, leading to the most enraging of conclusions, but driven by the sheer pleasure that anyone who has ever read Burney’s Evelina can attest to. From Burney, Romney moves on to Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho still captivates like a waking dream, to bold, witty, Charlotte Lennox, whose The Female Quixote Romney finds “far wittier than any of Austen’s novels”, to Elizabeth Inchbald, whose “concise, ironic” style anticipates Austen’s own. How are these writers not household names in a world where Austen stationery, Christmas decorations, coffee mugs and wallpaper all fly off the shelves at the gift shop at Jane Austen’s house in Hampshire, where the author’s 250th birthday celebrations are due to reach a climax this December?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf would not disappoint any reader who picked it up along with all their other Janeite merch but it’s so much more. A worthy sequel to Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, Romney’s book is as sharp an examination of the “great forgetting” of female writers as you could wish for, uncowed by big-name critics, buoyed instead by the instincts of a single reader trusting her honest enjoyment over dusty tradition. It also comes with a happy addendum: in addition to her book, Romney has built a small collection of the authors discussed at Indiana University’s Lilly Library. The new canon starts here.
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: The Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney is published by Ithaka (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
