Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney
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Blurb
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favourite novels.
Review
As soon as I saw this book I put it on my birthday list and my wonderful husband bought it for me. It was on my TBR pile for just over a week before I started reading it as I couldn’t resist.
I absolutely loved this book and could not put it down. The first thing I liked was the layout of the book as each chapter focuses on one of the authors that Jane Austen was known to have read. We get a good history of each author and what books, plays or collections of poems they wrote. We also learn about Jane Austen and how her life linked with these authors. I also really enjoyed learning about the reasons these women chose to write.
The other element I enjoyed was learning a bit about the rare book trade and how rare book dealers work. I enjoyed learning about the different editions that Romney collected, how she hunted them down, purchased them and appreciated them. I loved learning about rare editions of Austen novels and first editions of the authors focused on in the book. I also loved learning about how books were published in Austen’s time, how the print runs ran and what the paper and binding was made out of.
The only problem I had with this book was that as soon as I started reading this book I started a list of all the books these authors had written with the plan of reading them myself one day. This means my wish list of books has grown hugely. I have actually read a few off the list because I had an amazing English teacher who introduced me to the work of Ann Radcliffe and I became a fan of Frances Burney earlier this year. However, there are still plenty of books left for me to collect and read. I give this book 5 out of 5 Dragons and it is definitely one of my top reads of 2025.
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About the author
Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).
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