Wild for Austen by Devoney Looser

My thoughts:

I listened to this author’s class on Jane Austen last year and very much enjoyed it. Looser was a wonderful guide to Austen, her world and her novels.

I was intrigued to see what Looser would have to say in this book that is focused on “wildness” and if it would feel fresh. It did indeed.

This title is divided into three main sections, Wild Writings and Wild Family, followed by Shambolic Afterlives. In the first, Looser looks at each of the novels. Read about them all or pick a favorite. Either way, gain some insight.

The second section of the book delves into Jane’s relatives. Learn how one of Austen’s relatives was arrested for shoplifting and more.

Section 3, for example, has a chapter title Sense and Sensibility Goes to Court. Why?

Those interested in spending some time in Austen’s world will want to give this title a look.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for this title. All opinions are my own.

Pub date: 02 September 2025

Description:

From the publisher:

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

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.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.

About the author:

From Amazon:

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is author or editor of twelve books, most recently Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane (2025). Her previous books include Sister Novelists (2022) and The Making of Jane Austen (2017). Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, The TLS, and the Washington Post, and her series of 24 30-minute lectures on Austen is available through The Great Courses and Audible. In addition to being a quirky Janeite book nerd, Looser has played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.

More From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews:

Review

“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. This reading of all her work, some of her biography and family history, and many of the reactions―as criticism, as movies, as fandom―gallops along, as exhilarating as it is illuminating. Devoney Looser is a superb interpreter and astonishingly erudite scholar of all things Austen, and she brings her expertise to bear deftly, amusingly, informatively, leaving us with an Austen who’s ready to roll.” – Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

“Wild for Austen is the ultimate collection of essays about the beloved Jane and her place in history, literature, and even Hollywood. Devoney Looser places Jane in the pantheon, with her canon of novels, poems, stories, and unfinished works. Looser expertly chronicles how Jane Austen influences the adaptations of her own work after her death and inspires new storytelling through her characters, settings and style. Surprising and new facts unveiled and secrets revealed. I couldn’t put it down!” – Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Shoemaker’s Wife and The View From Lake Como

“By examining the people and events around Jane Austen, Looser makes a vivid and inviting case in Wild for Austen as to why Austen matters in ways both unconventional and challenging. From controversial relatives and acquaintances (accused shoplifters! International spies!) to Austen’s brothers’ abolitionist efforts, Looser unearths, sometimes single-handedly, enough fascinating personal histories to prove the famous line from Pride and Prejudice: ‘people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever.’ The very same can be said about Austen’s legacy over the centuries, and the essays collected here are 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. The reader will come away from this collection not only with new and enriching ways of looking at Austen and her books, but with an appreciation for the limits of biography, the histories that still remain hidden, and the compass that great writing can provide to move forward through it all.” – Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, The Bloomsbury Girls, and Austen at Sea

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