The Making of Jane Austen

by Devoney Looser

Overview

An engaging account of how Jane Austen became a household name.

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen's early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.

Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead.

Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421428994
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Devoney Looser is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the editor of Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism and coeditor (with E. Ann Kaplan) of Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Jane Austen Matters
Part I: Jane Austen, Illustrated
1. Austen's First English Illustrator: Ferdinand Pickering's Vioctorian Sensationalism
2. Visual Austen Experiments: From Lush Landscapes to Bearded Heroes
3. A Golden Age for Illustrated Austen: From Peacocks to Photoplays
Part II: Jane Austen, Dramatized
4. Austen's First Dramatist: Rosina Filippi's Duologues for Every Cultivated Amateur
5. Playing Mr. Darcy before Laurence Olivier: Cross Dressing, Consuming Passion, and Cracking the Whip
6. Dear Jane: Christian Spinster, Feminist Flirt, and Shadow Actress
7. Stage to Screen Pride and Prejudice: Hollywood's Austen and Its Unrealized Screenplays
Part III: Jane Austen, Politicized
8. The Night of the Divine Jane: Men's Club Clashes and Politics in the Periodical Press
9. Stone-Throwing Jane Austen: Suffragist Street Activism, Grand Pageants, and Costume Parties
Part IV: Jane Austen, Schooled
10. The First Jane Austen Dissertation: George Pellew and the Human Telephone
11. Textbook Austens: From McGuffey's Readers to National Lampoon
Coda: Twenty-First Century Jane Austen
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Suggested Further Reading
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Deborah Yaffe

This highly entertaining book makes clear that contemporary Janeites—with their cosplay, their clashing interpretations of much-loved novels, their wet-shirt Darcy, and their fiercely possessive relationship to their favorite author —are heirs to a tradition of Austen-love that stretches back to the early nineteenth century. Devoney Looser's brilliant detective work introduces us to a cast of creative, courageous, and eccentric women and men who helped keep Austen's work alive and vital into our own time.

Janine Barchas

A potential game changer, full of force and originality. Looser's refreshingly democratic approach to Austen scholarship not only will add to our knowledge of this author's reception history and literary afterlife but will surprise even the most informed Austen scholar.

From the Publisher

The Making of Jane Austen is beautifully written and replete with new information. Devoney Looser provides an incisive and thoroughly original account of how an obscure country clergyman’s daughter came to occupy a dominant position among the English novelists. In the bicentenary year of Austen’s death, this work will fascinate students, scholars and general readers alike.
—Peter Sabor, McGill University, coeditor of Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works

A potential game changer, full of force and originality. Looser's refreshingly democratic approach to Austen scholarship not only will add to our knowledge of this author's reception history and literary afterlife but will surprise even the most informed Austen scholar.
—Janine Barchas, University of Texas at Austin, author of Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity

This highly entertaining book makes clear that contemporary Janeites—with their cosplay, their clashing interpretations of much-loved novels, their wet-shirt Darcy, and their fiercely possessive relationship to their favorite author —are heirs to a tradition of Austen-love that stretches back to the early nineteenth century. Devoney Looser's brilliant detective work introduces us to a cast of creative, courageous, and eccentric women and men who helped keep Austen's work alive and vital into our own time.
—Deborah Yaffe, author of Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom

The Making of Jane Austen is a fascinating and often very funny account of how Austen became one of English literature's best-loved novelists. Devoney Looser has already made a reputation as one of her generation's foremost Austen scholars; here she takes her game to the next level.
—Jenny Davidson, Columbia University

Exuberant and unfailingly entertaining, The Making of Jane Austen challenges many pieties about the woman novelist and her fame. Looking beyond the elite caretakers of Austen’s reputation, Looser helps us better appreciate the multiple, surprising ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences enjoyed, used, and adapted Austen’s books.
—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University, author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History

A splendid and indispensable work for all readers interested in how Austen is not simply any old great author but a cultural icon who continues to evolve in fascinating and often conflicting ways.
—Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, author of Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures

Deidre Lynch

Exuberant and unfailingly entertaining, The Making of Jane Austen challenges many pieties about the woman novelist and her fame. Looking beyond the elite caretakers of Austen’s reputation, Looser helps us better appreciate the multiple, surprising ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences enjoyed, used, and adapted Austen’s books.

Claudia Johnson

A splendid and indispensable work for all readers interested in how Austen is not simply any old great author but a cultural icon who continues to evolve in fascinating and often conflicting ways.

Jenny Davidson

The Making of Jane Austen is a fascinating and often very funny account of how Austen became one of English literature's best-loved novelists. Devoney Looser has already made a reputation as one of her generation's foremost Austen scholars; here she takes her game to the next level.

Peter Sabor

The Making of Jane Austen is beautifully written and replete with new information. Devoney Looser provides an incisive and thoroughly original account of how an obscure country clergyman’s daughter came to occupy a dominant position among the English novelists. In the bicentenary year of Austen’s death, this work will fascinate students, scholars and general readers alike.

Editorial Reviews

Energetic and revealing.
—Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review

One of the most fascinating sections . . . consequently takes in the wildly different approaches of [Austen’s] early illustrators.
—Wall Street Journal

Looser is a sober and conscientiously corrective guide, constantly prompting us to historicise the conventional ways in which we conceive of Austen . . . This is a studious and sensible book, driven by a commitment to shedding light on Austen's work and context.
—Times Higher Education

Timely and authoritative.
—Times Literary Supplement

Austen fans have another book to add to their libraries.
—Publishers Weekly

[Looser's] arguments are refreshing and balanced. The Making of Jane Austen lovingly unveils Austen's posthumous journey to become a permanent fixture in classic English literature.
—Foreword Reviews

An informative and delightful read for literary lovers who want to learn more about one of the most celebrated authors of all time, The Making of Jane Austen puts the famed novelist in a whole new light.
—Bustle

Looser's book is full of forgotten performances, artists, and remakes, showing that Austen has long been enlisted to play a variety of roles.
—First Things

The Making of Jane Austen presents a compelling history of how the phenomenon of 'Jane! Austen!' came to be . . .
—Women's Writing

Written with wit and in pleasing yet learned prose, the book bridges well the gap between academic and popular writing . . . Altogether, new information for scholars and fans and great fun. Highly recommended.
—Choice

The Making of Jane Austen is both an essential, rigorously researched text for serious Austen scholars and an irresistibly lively reading experience for even the most newly initiated of Janeites.
—Romantic Circles

[W]hat The Making of Jane Austen offers the reader is a brilliant narrative that ends in hope. The story of how Jane Austen became, in Looser's words, 'Jane! Austen!', is a meandering tale with unlikely participants, unexpected twists, and a great deal of humour.
—Jane Austen Society of Australia

A groundbreaking effort to broaden the conversation about Austen's influence in terms of both content and audience, The Making of Jane Austen represents a major contribution to the fast-growing area of Austen reception studies and will be remembered as a book of the decade in Austen scholarship more generally.
—JASNA News

[A] fascinating new study of some of the ways Austen has been used by illustrators, actors, and activists.
—Hudson Review

In this brilliant new view of Austen, Devoney Looser tells us as much about what we want and need from our literary celebrities as [she] does about 'Aunt Jane' herself.
—Review 19

The book offers insightful close reading of several nineteenth-century illustrations of Austen’s fiction.
—Review of English Studies

Clearly organized into sections that dive deeply into the illustrated, the dramatized, and the politicized Austen as well as Austen pedagogy, from the first dissertation to the McGuffey Reader, The Making of Jane Austen provides a review of how Austen's image was shaped and shifted over time by those who marketed her work in books, films, and texts. Looser also looks at how both anti-suffrage men and suffragettes used Austen to prop up their viewpoint as people continue to look to Austen for conservative and liberal ideas. It seems Austen is almost biblical in her ability to be all things to all people.
—Tonstant Weader Reviews

Devoney Looser's delightfully discontinuous history signals straightaway the materiality of its Subject and its place between scholarly and popular mythologies. More subtly, it coaxes the reader to confront her own self in the act of 'making' Austen . . . Her inclusive, imaginative account is an important marker in the critical turn toward 'matters of fact,' building upon work by Janine Barchas, Claudia Johnson, and Kathryn Sutherland that historicizes Austen's referential texts, their reception, and her gradual institutionalization.
—ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts

Devoney Looser's latest full-scale contribution to Austen studies is an original, important and well-written book. It is valuable for the highly unusual areas she studies, for information about and clear descriptions of texts probably unknown to many Austen scholars and/or Janeites alike (this is a feat), for the critical intelligence and close reading she applies to some of these; and, for her tales of poignant lives of a few people who ought to be remembered for the significant contribution they made to the ways many people read Austen's texts today.
—Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Looser's book gives us a much-needed historical perspective, showing that the most cutting-edge and the most retrograde interpretations of Austen have a deeper history than we have imagined.
—Vivasvan Soni, Northwestern University, Modern Philology

Looser's book reminds us both how much invention has always been involved in creating Austen's literary reputation, and how frequently that invention has involved suppressing or distorting the voices of women and others who are not part of the dominant discourse. It is therefore also an important contribution to feminist scholarship more broadly, and to the growing body of scholarship that attempts to hear and recuperate the voices of the marginalized and oppressed.
—Katie Halsey, University of Stirling, author of Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Eminently readable and suitably polemical in places, The Making of Jane Austen will be of supreme interest not only to Austen scholars but to anyone seeking a fit model for unpicking the formation of a literary or historical reputation . . . With an enviable gift for marshalling unwieldy anecdotes, Looser has with outstanding energy and rigor traversed such places like no one else before her.
—Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Literature and History

From the Publisher

Energetic and revealing.

New York Times Book Review - Jane Smiley

Written with wit and in pleasing yet learned prose, the book bridges well the gap between academic and popular writing . . . Altogether, new information for scholars and fans and great fun. Highly recommended.

Choice

[Looser's] arguments are refreshing and balanced. The Making of Jane Austen lovingly unveils Austen's posthumous journey to become a permanent fixture in classic English literature.

Foreword Reviews

The Making of Jane Austen presents a compelling history of how the phenomenon of 'Jane! Austen!' came to be . . .

Women's Writing

The Making of Jane Austen is both an essential, rigorously researched text for serious Austen scholars and an irresistibly lively reading experience for even the most newly initiated of Janeites.

Romantic Circles

One of the most fascinating sections . . . consequently takes in the wildly different approaches of [Austen’s] early illustrators.

Wall Street Journal

Clearly organized into sections that dive deeply into the illustrated, the dramatized, and the politicized Austen as well as Austen pedagogy, from the first dissertation to the McGuffey Reader, The Making of Jane Austen provides a review of how Austen's image was shaped and shifted over time by those who marketed her work in books, films, and texts. Looser also looks at how both anti-suffrage men and suffragettes used Austen to prop up their viewpoint as people continue to look to Austen for conservative and liberal ideas. It seems Austen is almost biblical in her ability to be all things to all people.

Tonstant Weader Reviews

The book offers insightful close reading of several nineteenth-century illustrations of Austen’s fiction.

Review of English Studies

[W]hat The Making of Jane Austen offers the reader is a brilliant narrative that ends in hope. The story of how Jane Austen became, in Looser's words, 'Jane! Austen!', is a meandering tale with unlikely participants, unexpected twists, and a great deal of humour.

Jane Austen Society of Australia

"One of the most fascinating sections... consequently takes in the wildly different approaches of [Austen’s] early illustrators."

Wall Street Journal

"Devoney Looser's delightfully discontinuous history signals straightaway the materiality of its Subject and its place between scholarly and popular mythologies. More subtly, it coaxes the reader to confront her own self in the act of 'making' Austen... Her inclusive, imaginative account is an important marker in the critical turn toward 'matters of fact,' building upon work by Janine Barchas, Claudia Johnson, and Kathryn Sutherland that historicizes Austen's referential texts, their reception, and her gradual institutionalization."

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts

…[Looser] offers a good survey of the landscape of books in the 19th century: how they were presented to buyers and readers, how they were illustrated, which authors were popular and why…The first few chapters of The Making of Jane Austen plod forward in their perhaps necessary way, but the second half, where Looser discusses the various groups that attached themselves to Austen's works and saw themselves in Austen's works, especially at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, is energetic and revealing.

The New York Times Book Review - Jane Smiley

04/03/2017
Austen fans have another book to add to their libraries, one explaining how an author who died quietly and little known in 1817 became one of the world’s best-known authors. Looser (Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850), an English professor at Arizona State University, considers the factors—illustrations, dramatizations, and publications, as well as politics and education—influencing how past and present generations have perceived Jane Austen. She partly ascribes Austen’s lasting popularity to publisher Richard Bentley, who secured the rights to the novels from her estate and original publisher after her death. Bentley hired illustrator Ferdinand Pickering, who emphasized intense moments between female characters in anachronistic Victorian, rather than Regency, garb, making Austen seem “fresh and timely” to contemporary readers. Educators also helped increase awareness of Austen by frequently assigning her works. Readers will appreciate behind-the-scenes looks at Pride and Prejudice’s play and film adaptions, notably MGM’s 1940 version starring Laurence Olivier, and some amusing Marx Brothers and Gilligan’s Island connections. Of special interest may be the chapter on the politicization of Jane Austen; the first citation of her in this way was in 1872, by a Conservative Welsh MP opposed to female voting rights. Janeites will enjoy this scholarly but approachable book on the redoubtable Miss Austen. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Looser is a sober and conscientiously corrective guide, constantly prompting us to historicise the conventional ways in which we conceive of Austen . . . This is a studious and sensible book, driven by a commitment to shedding light on Austen's work and context.

Times Higher Education

Looser's book gives us a much-needed historical perspective, showing that the most cutting-edge and the most retrograde interpretations of Austen have a deeper history than we have imagined.

Modern Philology - Vivasvan Soni

Devoney Looser's latest full-scale contribution to Austen studies is an original, important and well-written book. It is valuable for the highly unusual areas she studies, for information about and clear descriptions of texts probably unknown to many Austen scholars and/or Janeites alike (this is a feat), for the critical intelligence and close reading she applies to some of these; and, for her tales of poignant lives of a few people who ought to be remembered for the significant contribution they made to the ways many people read Austen's texts today.

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

[A] fascinating new study of some of the ways Austen has been used by illustrators, actors, and activists.

Hudson Review

Looser's book is full of forgotten performances, artists, and remakes, showing that Austen has long been enlisted to play a variety of roles.

First Things

An informative and delightful read for literary lovers who want to learn more about one of the most celebrated authors of all time, The Making of Jane Austen puts the famed novelist in a whole new light.

Bustle

Timely and authoritative.

Times Literary Supplement

Looser's book reminds us both how much invention has always been involved in creating Austen's literary reputation, and how frequently that invention has involved suppressing or distorting the voices of women and others who are not part of the dominant discourse. It is therefore also an important contribution to feminist scholarship more broadly, and to the growing body of scholarship that attempts to hear and recuperate the voices of the marginalized and oppressed.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction - Katie Halsey

Eminently readable and suitably polemical in places, The Making of Jane Austen will be of supreme interest not only to Austen scholars but to anyone seeking a fit model for unpicking the formation of a literary or historical reputation . . . With an enviable gift for marshalling unwieldy anecdotes, Looser has with outstanding energy and rigor traversed such places like no one else before her.

Literature and History - Daniel Cook

A groundbreaking effort to broaden the conversation about Austen's influence in terms of both content and audience, The Making of Jane Austen represents a major contribution to the fast-growing area of Austen reception studies and will be remembered as a book of the decade in Austen scholarship more generally.

JASNA News

In this brilliant new view of Austen, Devoney Looser tells us as much about what we want and need from our literary celebrities as [she] does about 'Aunt Jane' herself.

Review 19

Devoney Looser's delightfully discontinuous history signals straightaway the materiality of its Subject and its place between scholarly and popular mythologies. More subtly, it coaxes the reader to confront her own self in the act of 'making' Austen . . . Her inclusive, imaginative account is an important marker in the critical turn toward 'matters of fact,' building upon work by Janine Barchas, Claudia Johnson, and Kathryn Sutherland that historicizes Austen's referential texts, their reception, and her gradual institutionalization.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts

"Devoney Looser’s delightfully discontinuous history signals straightaway the materiality of its Subject and its place between scholarly and popular mythologies. More subtly, it coaxes the reader to confront her own self in the act of "making" Austen."

Scholar Commons

"... fascinating new study..."

The Hudson Review