Reading Jane Austen
Reading Writers and their Work Series

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.

1. Letters; 2. Conversation; 3. Revision; 4. Manners; 5. Morals; 6. Voice; 7. Female economies.

Jenny Davidson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Professor Davidson's previously published works include Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004), Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (2009), and Reading Style: A Life in Sentences (2014). She is the author of four novels, Heredity (2003), The Explosionist (2008), Invisible Things (2010), and The Magic Circle (2013).