Wild for Austen - by Devoney Looser

So why did I give Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, by Devoney Looser, five stars? I already knew Austen to be a brilliant satirist who skewered those she disdained; I've read the madcap, irreverent stuff she wrote as a teen; and I've dissected her major novels, uncovering all sorts of salacious undercurrents the belie the prim and proper Miss Jane that early biographies promoted.

Despite feeling that the author was trying a bit too hard to make her "wild" point, I just really loved diving in Austen's work and life and times...again! It was a fun book to read--comforting in its familiarity, scholarly but accessible. Looser is a professor who has a knack of expressing her points elegantly. And, there was a lot of new info about Austen that I hadn't heard.

Part I is a walkthrough of Austen's works, starting with the Juvenilia and ending with the unfinished fragments. I particularly liked Chapter 3, "The Controversial Case of Sophia Sentiment," in which Looser lays out the case that Austen's first published work was a letter she wrote to The Loiterer, an Oxford weekly for which her brothers James and Henry wrote the bulk of the copy, under the pseudonym Sophia Sentiment. Looser convinced me that teenager Jane was in fact the author of this wonderful satirical letter. in which she argues for more romantic content and fewer stuffy essays.

Part II, "Fierce Family Ties," contained a lot of new information for me. Looser discusses Jane's relationship to the Burdett family--some of her letter indicate socializing with Frances Burdett and Sophia Burdett, respectively the sister and daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, a political radical who championed universal male suffrage and endured a stint in the Tower of London. 

I also learned a lot from the chapter on Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide, Jane's cousin and Henry's first wife. Jane spent a fair amount of time visiting Henry and Eliza, and Looser makes a compelling case about Jane's exposure to the international social set that Eliza enabled, including the Count and Countess d'Antraigueses--she was an opera singer and he was a spy--and they were brutually murdered in 1812. 

And here you thought you knew everything there was to know about Jane's life!

Part III, "Shambolic Afterlives," was particularly fun to read, from early literary conversations with Jane's ghost, to imaginary lovers, to erotica. The penultimate chapter, "Loving (and Hating) Jane Austen," was my favorite and probably the reason I gave the book 5 stars--here's a particularly good passage that resonated with me:

On balance, I've found and still find Austen's novels to be not only a profound personal pleasure to read and reread but also a shared vehicle to explore with others what it might be to try to live a meaningful life in a world that's deeply unfair.     

Author and Austen scholar, Devoney Looser