Searching for Jane Austen

    Searching for Jane Austen demolishes with wit and vivacity the often-held view of "Jane," a decorous maiden aunt writing her small drawing-room stories of teas and balls. Emily Auerbach presents a different Jane Austen—a brilliant writer who, despite the obstacles facing women of her time, worked seriously on improving her craft and became one of the world’s greatest novelists, a master of wit, irony, and character development.
    In this beautifully illustrated and lively work, Auerbach surveys two centuries of editing, censoring, and distorting Austen’s life and writings. Auerbach samples Austen’s flamboyant, risqué adolescent works featuring heroines who get drunk, lie, steal, raise armies, and throw rivals out of windows. She demonstrates that Austen constantly tested and improved her skills by setting herself a new challenge in each of her six novels.
    In addition, Auerbach considers Austen’s final irreverent writings, discusses her tragic death at the age of forty-one, and ferrets out ridiculous modern adaptations and illustrations, including ads, cartoons, book jackets, newspaper articles, plays, and films from our own time. An appendix reprints a ground-breaking article that introduced Mark Twain’s "Jane Austen," an unfinished and unforgettable essay in which Twain and Austen enter into mortal combat. 

Jane Austen's remarkable comprehension of the complexity of human nature is abundantly reflected by her writing, says Auerbach (English, U. of Wisconsin-Madison). It is thus ironic that although Austen understood clearly the discrepancy between the ideal and the real, her life and literary legacy have frequently been censored, edited, and distorted by a public determined to manipulate her image to reflect society's mores and ideals. Through an examination of Austen's lesser-known and unpublished writings, her six published novels, and modern pop-culture references, Auerbach offers Austen aficionados a readable, entertaining portrait of a feisty, irreverent, and resilient woman. The book contains illustrations (some of which are rarely seen in print). In an appendix, Auerbach reprints an intriguing Mark Twain essay about Austen and suggests that Twain's documented distaste of Austen's writing deserves reexamination: could Twain have been a secret Jane fan? Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Publishers Weekly

Many of Austen's detractors, and even quite a few of her fans, regard "Jane" as a dull homebody who wrote light, fluffy books for girls. "This attitude must end," Auerbach fumes as she tries to "strip off [the] ruffles and ringlets" that have shaped the author's public image. The Austen sketched here is an ambitious novelist, confident in her superior talent, with a subversive and biting sense of humor. Close readings of the novels, as well as the often ignored "juvenilia," reveal a rich literary sensibility dense with allusion-if you haven't read Austen already, the microscopic attention to detail here will make you pick up her books. Auerbach's scholarly background in 19th-century literature (she's a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison) serves her well in this analysis, but her revisionist approach is most engaging when it wrestles with her subject's public image. She demonstrates how Austen's own family whitewashed that image by suppressing much of her correspondence, and riffs through an assortment of modern portrayals that bear little resemblance to the woman Auerbach uncovers. Like Austen's, Auerbach's humor can be sly. Subtly questioning Mark Twain's professed hatred of Austen, she imagines the pair as Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen. Readers who enjoyed the novel The Jane Austen Book Club will find similar pleasures here, though the high price may prove an obstacle. B&w illus. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Emily Auerbach is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, cohost of Wisconsin Public Radio’s University of the Air, and director of the Courage to Write series of radio documentaries on brave women writers. She has won numerous teaching, broadcasting, and arts awards and has published books, guides, and articles on nineteenth-century literature. Auerbach holds a lifetime membership in the Jane Austen Society of North America.