One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020

"A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another." --The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)

"An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." -- Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live

"About 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.

• We started tracking this book on May 24, 2020.
• This book was $14.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 11 times in the past 1,677 days.
• The current price of this book is $2.99 last checked one day ago.
• The lowest price to date was $2.99 last reached on November 26, 2024.
• This book has been $2.99 4 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on September 4, 2021.
• This book has been $14.99 2 times since we started tracking it.
• This book is currently at its lowest price since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 306 Pages
• File Size: 3,501 KB