Devoney Looser

author of Wild for Austen

About Wild for Austen

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels cited in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.

Review

I never knew how much I didn’t know about Jane Austen. I’ve always loved Pride and Prejudice and Persuassion but I never knew anything about the woman behind the stories.

Devoney Looser has woven a fact-driven examination of Jane Austen’s wilder side. Through letters that Jane herself wrote, examinations of her books, and accounts of her life from close aquantences Looser has compiled a compelling account of a woman who has been pigeonholed into a submissive role that doesn’t seem to fit the woman Looser has found in references and primary sources.

I loved this book. Devoney Looser makes such a persuasive argument that I am never going to think of Jane Austen the same ever again.