“Jane Austen, Book Owner”

This was the title of my talk at the JASNA AGM in Cleveland last month. I covered a variety of topics, focusing mostly on female book ownership in Jane’s Austen’s time and how she fit into that world of being a “book owner.” David Gilson in his A Bibliography of Jane Austen lists 20 titles that are known to have been owned by Austen, the only way of knowing for sure because she inscribed them. There were others that she gifted to family members and I have included those as well.

The wealth of information on Jane Austen as a reader is quite overwhelming – I direct you to the recently published What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why) by Susan Allen Ford (Bloomsbury, 2024), where there is an excellent summary of her reading in the introduction and chapter one. Also see my bibliography posted below. But my focus was just on the books Austen owned, fitting those into the various subject categories of a gentleman’s or elite lady’s private library, and thereby seeing the variety of works she felt strongly enough about to inscribe her name with that pride of ownership.

I will not be publishing this paper, though I might gradually publish it in sections on this blog – but I did have handouts at the talk and so I am putting both of those on here now: the list of books Austen owned and where they are now, and a very select bibliography of the many books and articles and websites I consulted during my research.

I will add that the Richardson Sir Charles Grandison that was in David Gilson’s private collection is indeed at King’s College Library, Cambridge, as Peter Sabor suggested at the end of my talk. So I have edited the handout to reflect that.

More to come on this very interesting topic, but wanted to get these handouts available to people, as we didn’t have enough during the breakout session.

Jane Austen’s Library:

Jane Austen, Book Owner: Select Bibliography:

*************
Thank you to all of you who came to my session – very hard choices – I wanted to be at other talks myself! For those of you who have the virtual component of the meeting, my talk was recorded and is available at that virtual JASNA link you would have been sent via email.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

c2024JaneAustenInVermont