Living with Jane Austen

This intimate personal engagement, by an eminent Austen authority, shows how living with Jane Austen can transform the way we look at the world. Janet Todd discusses all Austen's works - fragments, childhood writings, novels and letters - uncovering a timeless writer whose themes and prose continue powerfully to speak to us.

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Introduction; 1. The Brightness of Pemberley; 2. The Darkness of Darcy; 3. Talking and Not Talking; 4. Making Patterns; 5. Poor Nerves; 6. The Unruly Body; 7. Into Nature; 8. Giving and Taking Advice; 9. Being in the Moment; 10. How to Die; Afterword.