Wild for Austen

A rebellious, subversive and untamed Jane

Devoney Looser

• Publisher: Ultimo Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781761154676
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched – the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost sightings, Austen novels cited in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

PRAISE FOR WILD FOR AUSTEN
‘Jane the prim and proper is laid to rest here, so that Jane the satirist, Jane the subversive – Jane the wild can rise and make her trouble.’ Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

‘Surprising and new facts unveiled and secrets revealed. I couldn't put it down!’ – Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author

‘a joyful, thought-provoking exploration of why we continue to debate, defend, or debunk the Victorian-era persona of a sheltered spinster who lived behind her quill pen’ – Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society

‘I’m wild about Devoney Looser. No one else wears such deep Austen scholarship so lightly. A brilliant book!’ – Lucy Worsley, author of Jane Austen at Home

‘Roller-skating twenty-first century scholar meets iconic nineteenth-century author in this dazzling new book. Combining meticulous historical scholarship with acute understanding of present culture, Devoney Looser replaces the old reticent Jane Austen with a woman thoroughly embedded in her turbulent times – and ours.’ – Janet Todd, author of Living with Jane Austen

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Part I: Wild Writings
• Part II: Fierce Family Ties
• Part III: Shambolic Afterlives
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Copyright Page