Most of us have only to read Jane Austen to know that we love her. The best literary criticism, of which this part-memoir by Janet Todd, Living with Jane Austen, is one example, helps us understand why we love her. It is filled with quotations from Austen’s work.

Uncharacteristically this self-help book sends us not just to a brave new world of our own making but to an unequalled series of classic novels, not in some perhaps botched translation but in our very own English language, by, as Todd points out, ‘the creator of the perfect fictional sentence’. Nor is this some unreflecting hagiography or indiscriminating eulogy, though any warts are real ones, not speculative, but based on actual texts. Austen’s times were fraught and, although female voices such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s were starting to be heard, the rights of women were negligible. The threat of war was consuming (two of Austen’s brothers were naval men). Still, she lived in a more robust age than ours, a time when childbirth and aged care, life and death, were in the domestic realm, women’s business.

Victorian respectability was a thing of the future. So we do get some doubtful jokes and disconcerting judgements. And Austen’s attitudes, as Todd reveals, are not necessarily shared by us with our 21st-century slant on life. She esteems the lure of tradition, the love of homeland, an admiration for those of stoical or equable disposition. She has a mind refreshingly free from cant and sentimentality, and an almost complete disregard for ideology (and she a parson’s daughter!).

In Living with Jane Austen Todd writes of the pressure she was under to produce this volume in time for the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. There is no sign of stress, although the absence of an index is a disappointment, which may of course be unrelated. Rather it seems that we are being invited to share in a warm friendship of inestimable benefit, the inspiration that Austen has been over Todd’s long life, though unlike most of us she did not encounter Austen as an adolescent. She did not read Mansfield Park as the homesick girl sent from Sri Lanka to English boarding school, nor Pride and Prejudice when first encountering young men. What is thoroughly appealing about this meld of literary criticism and memoir lies in its implicit invitation to readers to do what she has done – recall the works and the circumstances under which they were read at different periods of our lives. Re-reading is fundamental to our wellbeing.

For Todd the novels are ‘more beautiful now … than they were half a lifetime ago’, a timely reminder from an octogenarian to return to the novels before it is too late! After all, we are not just re-reading the novels we are re-reading our own lives, and literate teenagers have a lifetime of involvement ahead as they too start living with Jane Austen.

Reviewed by Judith Crabb

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned novelist and academic, best known for her non-fiction feminist works on women writers including Jane Austen, Aphra Behn and Mary Wollenstonecraft.

Janet has published and edited more than 40 books including the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Marilyn Butler), of Aphra Behn, and, as General Editor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. She has compiled encyclopedias of women writers and written individual biographies: Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life; Rebel Daughters/ Daughters of Ireland; Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle ; Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels; Aphra Behn A Secret Life (2017) and Jane Austen’s Sanditon (2019).

Janet has worked in universities around the world including Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America and India. She was a professor of English Literature at UEA, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities, before becoming president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2008-2015), Cambridge where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham and Lucy Cavendish Colleges. In 2013, Janet was given an OBE for her services to higher education and literary scholarship.

Visit Janet Todd’s website