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Reading with Jane Austen

by Elaine Bander

Paperback

$29.95

Hardback

$150.00

eBook (ePub)

$29.95

Quantity

Price:: $29.95
ISBN:: 9781684485857
Published:: Mar 10, 2026

Release Date:: 10th March 2026
Publisher:: Bucknell University Press
Imprint:: Bucknell University Press
Pages:: 206

Description
Praise
Contents
Authors

Jane Austen has more readers today than at any time in history. Many of Austen’s legions of fans, however, came to her novels after first seeing films or other adaptations made for twenty-first century audiences. Austen herself conversely spent her literary career undermining romantic clichés and rethinking novel conventions. Confident that she and her contemporaries shared a common reading culture, Austen deliberately constructed her novels to set readerly expectations, only to disrupt or confound those expectations by challenging her readers’ assumptions and values. In Reading with Jane Austen, Elaine Bander carefully rereads the great author’s novels—beginning with her late work of juvenilia, “Catharine, or The Bower,” and ending with her final fragment, “Sanditon”—against the rich context of late Georgian literary and intellectual culture. In doing so, Bander invites us into the transformative experience that Austen intentionally designed for her earliest readers, adding new layers of appreciation for those who love her work.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

“Reading with Jane Austen sets out to help us re-see the great novelist’s aims and achievements by carefully, clearly, and productively describing them alongside the significant writings of her best-loved contemporaries. Elaine Bander’s fine book will have you rereading Austen in engaging, surprising, and powerful new ways.”
- Devoney Looser, author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

“Reading with Elaine Bander is a delicious and rewarding experience. She introduces us to the authors and the books that Jane Austen and her readers loved and admired, tracing the ways Austen both subverts conventions and clichés and reimagines what the novel can be. Reading with Jane Austen is a gift.”
- Susan Allen Ford, author of What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why)

“Light, bright, and sparkling, Bander's account of her own life of teaching and writing under the sign of Austen brought me enormous delight and deserves a place in every Austen fan's library.”
- Jenny Davidson, author of Reading Jane Austen

“Reading with Jane Austen is a meticulous and innovative study illuminating the literary culture that shaped Austen’s art. With scholarly precision and fresh insights, Elaine Bander draws on a lifetime spent with Austen and her precursors to reconstruct what Austen read and might have read—revealing new dimensions of her taste, intelligence, and creative engagement.”
- Peter Sabor, coeditor of Jane Austen's Manuscript Works

“A long-awaited manuscript from a respected Austen scholar, Elaine Bander’s Reading with Jane Austen offers significant insights into Austen’s creative process.”
- Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, author of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness

Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Jane Austen’s Words
2. Reading Frances Burney
3. Robert Burns, Sir Charles Grandison, and Sir Edward Denham
4. Charlotte Smith in “Catharine, or the Bower”
5. Mrs. Smith in Northanger Abbey
6. Reading Mysteries at Bath and Northanger
7. Reading Marianne Dashwood
8. From Cecilia to Pride and Prejudice: “What becomes of the moral?”
9. Reading Mr. Darcy
10. Fanny Price: “all the heroism of principle”
11. Love and Friendship in Emma
12. The Smiths in Persuasion
Conclusion: The Sea, “Sanditon,” and Speculation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

ELAINE BANDER is retired from Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, where she taught English for three decades. She is the author of dozens of essays and several book chapters on Austen and other writers and served as president of the Jane Austen Society of North America (Canada) as well as of the Burney Society (North America).

Related topics: American Literary Criticism / Women Authors