Devoney Looser presents Wild for Austen with Andrea Kaston Tange

Generations of critics, scholars, and fans have piled layers of meaning and interpretation onto Austen’s body of work and on the sparse surviving evidence of her life. That’s led to a messy set of competing versions of who she was, which continue to stick to her image. Against this backdrop, a shift in Austen’s reputation from mild to wild has happened in fits and starts. As Looser shows, these tussles began soon after Austen died in 1817. But how did they actually unfold, and why should we stop thinking of her as having led a very sheltered life?

To answer these questions, Looser starts with an impressive examination of Austen’s novels, juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even poetry, uncovering striking new gems in each. Looser also presents entirely new and deepened biographical stories of eclectic family members whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction. Included, too, are new accounts of the Austen family’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and its later fraught involvements in women’s suffrage activism. Looking beyond the life and writings, Looser provides extraordinary accounts of early ghost-sightings, of Austen novels cited in courts of law, and of the incredible unrealized film adaptations that might have changed pop culture history had they come to fruition.

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

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of several books, including Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, The TLS, and The Washington Post. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.

Andrea Kaston Tange is a professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Macalester College. Her first book focused on Victorian domesticity, and her most recent work is on Victorian visual culture — from illustrations of the supposed villain of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion to early, tender photographs of mothers and children. She is working on a monograph entitled Imagined Encounters: Public Impressions and Private Lives in the Age of Empire, and currently serves on the boards of the Association of Departments of English and of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association.

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