I started reading this book and found that it was not for me. It didn't seem fair for me to review a book that I didn't finish.

I liked this book very much and am sorry I didn't get a review assignment on it in the crush of the COVID publishing mess. Deft, witty, and informative.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book and it didn’t quite hit for me, but the writing was certainly impressive. Will be very interesting to lovers of Austen.

This was such an interesting lens through which to view Austen novels, and made me appreciate them all the more. Cohen's experience is one I'm glad she shared with us. I related so much to the death of a parent shortly after the birth of a first child, that it was almost hard to read. Solid novel!

Review published in Open Letters Review:

When Rachel Cohen was young, she thought the novels of Jane Austen were frothy coming-of-age stories. “I thought of Austen as a writer for the young woman I had been,” she writes in Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels. As she matured, she turned back to Austen and found something entirely different: “Austen’s subject…is not women embroidering on sofas but life with other people.” At a period in her life when Cohen was grappling with significant changes in her own “life with other people,” she turned again and again to the novels of Jane Austen as a kind of reflective glass to help her make sense of the commitment to domestic partnership, the experience of motherhood, her shifting relationship with her sister, her connection to her father, and the grief she felt after his death. Over these years, she dipped into Austen’s novels constantly, reading them “like a map.”

Review continued https://openlettersreview.com/posts/austen-years-by-rachel-cohen

In Austen Years, Rachel Cohen takes us through her years reading and rereading five of Jane Austen’s novels over periods of grief and transformation. What follows is a mixture of biographical paragraphs on Jane Austen’s life, exploration of the author’s life in particular chronicling the passing of her father and becoming a mother of two children, as well as literary criticism of Jane Austen’s writings. From the start I found myself pulled into the way Cohen thinks about her experience with reading Austen and how it has transformed as her life circumstances, and she in turn, have changed. The reader coming to a book with their own emotional baggage, previous literary history, preconceptions, mood, state or point in a journey changes the reading we do. This much is probably not revelatory, yet I found the actual journey of following a reader examining the way this had happened in a concrete sense rather thought-inspiring. So much so that I wrote an entire post about my own journey into Austen (though I have only read them through once). Cohen writes about seeing different things in Austen’s literary worlds depending on where in her life she has been; how Austen writes children, how she writes about grief, war and politics more broadly, home and house, even plays – particularly connecting this theme discussion to Mansfield Park in which the cast spend several pages preparing for a performance and in which the play itself has plot and character importance. With every point, she explores her status as a reader changing and noting on what she is seeing in Austen’s books, she takes us on various bypasses, not necessarily leading to a main street but rather allowing us to experience her mind wandering and taking organic steps in a journey. For example, a point she makes in connection with Austen and playwriting is that Austen almost mimics the play form in the way she will often describe not just what the characters are saying but how they are saying things, not only what they are communicating but how they are standing, in what part of the room – placing them figuratively and spatially in the scene akin to a play’s directions of a cast.

Aside from the literary, there are parts to the book that are more traditionally biographical of Jane Austen as a person. Cohen explores the life and immediate context of the woman who came to write stories that have lasted and been loved for almost 200 years and are likely to live on much longer still. Austen herself lost a father as a young woman, which Cohen seems especially to catch onto with her own mirrored experience. A father who plays a particular role too in the work of both women – writing, telling stories. While the biography is on the light side, it does provide some interesting information for those of us who have not yet become acquainted with the authoress behind the works – although it might not provide much new information for the already well-versed in Austen biographies. In fact, Cohen quotes Claire Tomalin’s 1997 book frequently – which seems the one book to go to if one wants a deeper exploration in Austen rather than her novels and their legacy. It’s clear that what Cohen first and foremost cares about is Austen in her writing, the creator — the biography only serves to add nuance to that portrait and background knowledge to the literary discussion that sometimes connects with particulars to Austen’s own life and how she saw the world informing how she wrote characters and plots.

Lastly, this is quite centrally a memoir – in the sense that Cohen extensively writes about her relationship with her father, before and after he has died; about having her first child while her father was still alive and the second after he had passed, becoming a parent herself and learning to raise a new generation; about time, work, love, walking, standing still, moving on, writing, connecting, death, family, and more. Often the memoir portions stand side by side with particularly heavy Austen-sections, the transitions not always smoothly or convincingly done. Other times the parallels are clearer and rather more successful – particularly I felt this to be the case when she thinks of time, such as connecting Austen’s revisions of her novels to Cohen rereading Austen’s books – the way both reader and writer changes as the process is happening, how the person who started at the re- is no longer the same when finished; a continuous process as long as one lives.

While I often felt that the three-folded nature to the book did not come together so that it could feel quite fragmented and hard to penetrate to any one weighted point, I also enjoyed the reading experience as a bit of a thought-experiment and allowing myself to ponder a similarly personal journey. With much of the literary criticism too, it’s hard to imagine who it’s meant for – as it includes lengthy text sections and quotations it is tedious reading. For someone who have not read the books they probably feel a bit pointless, a bit redundant for those familiar with the original texts. I think perhaps the points she does make (many of them strike me as clever) could’ve been given freer space to expand without sticking so close to textual analysis. Towards the end, Cohen makes an excellent point of Austen not often giving particulars in the sense that “not many adjectives or textures or facial features. [..] But, when she comes to write fiction, what she uses, as Ta-Nehisi Coates notices, is something closer to interruption.” giving an example of how Austen describes Elizabeth Bennett being dressed as “she had dressed with more than usual care” — this lack of particulars giving the text a sense of timelessness allowing anyone to place themselves in that situation. For me this seemed an apt way of thinking of the way so many thoughtful readers have connected to Jane Austens’ work for almost two centuries – at least part of it being explained by its openness and space for the reader to add their own details to the scene, making the novel thus very much their own and ultimately their own in plurality with every new reading and new version of oneself that encounters Austen’s books.

I was probably a less than ideal candidate for reading this book. I've struggled with this type of newer nonfiction, a combination of memoir and literary, in the past. Plus, I haven't read Austen since my high school days and wasn't a fan back then. Despite that I was drawn in at certain times to her personnel story, new child, father recently passed, and curious about her literary comments. Interesting to see that [author:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964], has also written literary criticism of Austen. For three years she diligently read Austen, trying to make sense of her own life through Austen's words.

I think I would have gotten more from this had I previously reread Austen's more popular novels. Was just too long ago, maybe I would get more from her works than I did reading as a teenager. It did, however, spark my interest in rereading, at least I'll start with one and see how it goes.

ARC from Netgalley.

I absolutely loved the concept of this book but the kind of stilted writing style made it a bit hard to completely love.

The author kept a journal of her experiences reading novels by Jane Austen during her Austen years.

And I enjoyed reading about the Jane Austen novels from her perspective.

My problem with Austen Years is twofold.

First, the writing. Cohen's writing is flighty, lacking in solidity. It wants to be poetic and expansive but accomplishes neither. In Austen Years there is always a line or two that disrupts the flow of the entire passage, and oftentimes those lines are ones that are supposed to clinch the passage's point, not obfuscate it. Here I'm talking about lines like,

"A kind of rose, but without sentiment, the matter-of-fact, pale, interfused rose that the sun leaves int he sky when it sets at the end of a midwester winter"

or

"You can only be interrupted by someone else, who has been active in other things elsewhere, while you have been doing the thing you have been doing. When someone else demands your attention, it is a sign of the multiplicity of life moving forward."

...what ?

It felt like the book was aiming for a style like Mark Doty's in his excellent What is the Grass, but having just read Doty's book only made me more aware of how much Cohen's paled in comparison.

Second, the structure. Austen Years sorely needed some kind of narrative cohesion. Each chapter was split into a bunch of subsections, most of which just didn't flow. Aside from all falling under the general theme of the chapter and the Austen novel in question, I didn't at all understand how they were related. I also think that Cohen especially fell short when it came to blending her own life with Austen's works. She tended to write either exclusively about Austen's work/life--in large, seemingly tangential swaths, too--and then to make a hard right into her own life, with nothing to bridge the two. It was jarring to go from one to the other, and it made reading both confusing and frankly not very enjoyable. I love reading about anything, and I mean anything, Jane Austen-related, but even I found it hard to get through the Austen sections.

I can understand that writing this book must've been a very personal project for Cohen, given that she goes into detail about her father's passing away and her subsequent grief, but as a narrative it just didn't work for me.

I’m strangely drawn to a weird niche category of books where the author takes up a particular—and often unusual—hobby to deal with grief after the loss of a loved one. Helen Macdonald’s “H is For Hawk” falls into this category, as does Katie Arnold’s more recent book about ultrarunning, “Running Home” and So Litt Woon Long’s memoir, “The Way Through the Woods,” in which she describes being drawn into the world of mushroom hunting after the sudden death of her husband. I also really enjoy books that combine memoir with literary and biographical exploration of a particular author, like Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in Middlemarch,” which I absolutely loved. Rachel Cohen’s “Austen Years” combines the two, as she deals with the loss of her father by dedicating herself to years of reading only Jane Austen books. I should say from the start that if you don’t like Austen, you probably won’t like “Austen Years,” as it includes quite a bit of textual analysis and assumes a familiarity—and indeed a great appreciation—of at least five of Austen’s six completed books. (Early in the book, the author recounts a joke about the philosopher Gilbert Ryle: “Someone had asked Ryle if he ever read literature in addition to philosophy. And Ryle replied, ‘Of course, I read all six every year.’”) And, much like grief itself, this book is not particularly straightforward or linear—it digresses and winds back on itself in a ruminative, wistful way. But if you are an Austen fan and if, moreover, you are comfortable allowing a book to unfold at a contemplative pace, “Austen Years” will be a quiet treat.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

“Austen’s novels offer strange friendship: in their company you may feel more yourself, look out at the world with clear sight.”

I am internally flawed in a way that I fall for anything and everything that has the word “Austen” in it. My brain stops working and I am a zombie walking slowly levitating towards the book with one thing in mind: I must read this! I am saying this because it’s apparent I cannot judge a book that has Jane Austen on its title unbiased as I absolutely love everything about the author and her novels.
Austen years is the memoir of Rachel Cohen, telling us about her personal experiences of reading Austen. She talks about the period in the her life when she only read Austen novels for a couple of years. Cohen talks about the pain and mourning of losing someone you love and how she found condolence in Austen books during one of the most difficult and challenging periods of her life.
Austen Years goes back and forth between Cohen’s and Austen’s life. Each section is dedicated to one of the five core novels of Austen and she associates the novels with her life with a heart-warming account.
I especially loved the analogy Cohen created; Austen’s universe with each novel as a planet:

“If I picture a map of the five Austen novels in my mind, the first four are like the orbiting bodies of a planetary system, widening outward in concentric circles, from the tight binary star of the two sisters in Sense and Sensibility, to the family of Pride and Prejudice, to the wider ellipse of Mansfield Park, all the way out to the perfectible community resonant in Emma. Persuasion is something like an asteroid that moves, irregularly, repeatedly, among the different spheres.”

Overall a good reading experience for Austen fans and her novels.

A rich and thoughtful look at how reading can inform a life, as well as shape and sustain it. While the pacing of this highly original memoir sometimes falters, the wisdom of its observations about life and death, birth and grief are hauntingly acute.

Austen Years by Rachel Cohen is a thoughtful and touching memoir about a specific and emotionally turbulent period in the authors life. Within a short space of time she lost her beloved father and had two children, and amongst all the disorder and upheaval she found herself turning to a familiar companion, choosing only to read the works of Austen. In this book she takes the reader on that journey with her, and though the meandering style of her narration may not be to everyone's taste, I enjoyed it. As she analyses each novel and the emotional impact and support that she found within their pages, I found myself thinking about my responses to the same works and how familiarity brings comfort.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

While there have been several fictionalized re-writes of Austen characters in recent years, I enjoyed that this book came from a different perspective where the author applied her love and appreciation for the novels to her own life and personal experiences. Her exploration of her own grief through this lens was especially poignant.

I've been excited about this book since I first heard about it, and it did not disappoint. The characters sucked you into the story and the story kept you turning pages as fast as you could. I devoured it in a day. I loved it.

Austen Years
A Memoir in Five Novels
by Rachel Cohen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Biographies & Memoirs

Pub Date 12 May 2020  



I am reviewing a copy of The Austen Years through Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, and Netgalley:



In the time between the birth of her first child and the death of her Father, Rachel Cohen found herself turning to Jane Austen to make a better sense of this new reality of hers. She had been simultaneously grief stricken and had her spirits lifted by the birth of her daughter. Austen’s novels helped her to answer the hard questions about her grief, her mourning and She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing.


In Austen years we get a deep look at the writers relationship to reading, it is written in a heartfelt and sensitive matter, allowing the readers a deeper emotional understanding to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. This book allows you to see how her reading of Austen helped her through a time of loss.


If you are awesome fan, a reader of Austen novels you will love Austen Years.



I give The Austen Years five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

I received a copy of this memoir from the publisher via NetGalley.

This isn't for me sadly, despite the fact that I am very fond of Jane Austen's novels. The opening section lacked any sense of structure and wandered to and fro in time and the novels and I felt lost. After that it settled down to focus on the novels one by one (or so I thought, but there is still a tendency to meander). I was not aware of Rachel Cohen before requesting this book and, while she writes movingly of her grief for her father, I am not interested enough in her to persist for that reason. I'm not learning anything I didn't already know about Austen or the novels either. The division of the heroines into 'E's' (Emma and Elizabeth) and the 'anns' (Fanny and Anne) was the end for me.

A gorgeous read I was swept right into Rachel Cohens life.Her devotion to Jane Austen’s books support ing her life her emotions.As she gives birth to her children her marriage and the sad death of her Dad.she dips in and out of the books her moments of solace strength.This is a lyrical read a book that flows with the authors beautiful words thoughts.Highly recommend.#netgalley#fsg