Austen Years
A Memoir in Five Novels
by Rachel Cohen
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Pub Date Jul 21 2020 | Archive Date Sep 01 2020
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Description
"An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
"Exhilarating and beautiful." --Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
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.
The publication date of this title has changed. The new publication date is 07/21/20
Advance Praise
“Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a work of compassionate and meditative alchemy. It explores the patterns that hold together life, art, love and loss; the spaces between memory and memorialisation, between literary creation and lived experience, between inspiration and revelation, reading and re-reading. Like the implacable action of tidal waters upon the shore, it returns to, shapes, and quietly unearths hidden treasures from what we thought was familiar ground. It’s an absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again.”
—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
“I’m excited to read anything Rachel Cohen writes, inspired by the delicate precision of her thought and the grace of her expression. In Austen Years, the marriage of Rachel’s rare attentiveness with Jane Austen’s beloved novels makes for an exhilarating and beautiful book.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“In the achingly precise Austen Years, the refusal to be finished reading the texts that mean most to us converges with the desire to bring a halt to time’s passage in the mourning of the loss of a parent, or the daily transformations of being one. The delicacy and patience of Rachel Cohen’s approach match that of her subject.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
“I read Austen Years with real pleasure and fascination over several evenings—it’s a truly exceptional piece of work, a tender and moving meditation on fiction and family memory, on Austen and on Cohen’s beloved father, all so surprisingly combined and acutely observed. It’s completely captivating.”
—Richard Holmes, author of This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer
“In her biographies, Rachel Cohen displays one of the most widely ranging minds I’ve ever encountered in a book. Stunningly, in Austen Years, she reveals that during a lengthy period of personal transitions, she turned exclusively to a single author, Jane Austen, immersing herself intensely. Her memoir is an astonishingly fresh reading of Austen’s novels, a deeply felt reexamination of their great themes (love, inheritance, how to be with others in the world), and a lyrical ode to the pleasures and rewards of paying close attention. It will sit next to Pride and Prejudice on my shelf.”
—Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, winner of the NBCC Award in Biography
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374107031 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 304 |
Available on NetGalley
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