num_pages: 304
description: An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to liveAbout seven years ago not too long before our daughter was born and a year before my father died Jane Austen became my only author.In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning memorializing living in a household paying attention to the world reading writing and imagining through Austen's novels.Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer's relationship to reading and to her own family winding together memoir criticism and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen's novels the scope of Austen Years widens successively with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge Massachusetts where she raises her small children and contemplates her father's last letter a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later moving with her family to Chicago Cohen grapples with her growing children teaching and her father's legacy all refracted through the denser more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen's life and literature and guided by Austen's mournful and hopeful final novel Persuasion Rachel Cohen's Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence a love letter to a literary master and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.
language: English
title: Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux