How popular was Jane Austen?

In this talk, Professor Katie Halsey will reflect on the relative popularity of Jane Austen and her female contemporaries.

In 2025, the 250th year since her birth, Jane Austen is possibly the best-known female writer of all time. But in her own time, she was relatively unknown, and sales of her books were dwarfed by those of her more famous contemporaries, such as Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe.

In this talk, Austen expert Professor Katie Halsey will explore the popularity of women writers of Austen's time. Using evidence of book circulation from Scottish libraries, drawn from the 'Books and Borrowing 1750-1830' research project, Halsey will show which women writers were most popular with ordinary readers in their own time. She will also present new research about the extraordinary lives of some of Austen's earliest readers who were Napoleonic Prisoners of War paroled in the Borders town of Selkirk from 1811 to 1814.

Katie Halsey is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling, and author of 'Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945'. She recently led the research project 'Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830', which aimed to establish which books were really popular in Scotland in this period.

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Host or Publisher National Library of Scotland