Reviews

"The Making of Jane Austen is beautifully written and replete with new information. Devoney Looser provides an incisive and thoroughly original account of how an obscure country clergyman’s daughter came to occupy a dominant position among the English novelists. In the bicentenary year of Austen’s death, this work will fascinate students, scholars and general readers alike."

"A potential game changer, full of force and originality. Looser's refreshingly democratic approach to Austen scholarship not only will add to our knowledge of this author's reception history and literary afterlife but will surprise even the most informed Austen scholar."

"This highly entertaining book makes clear that contemporary Janeites—with their cosplay, their clashing interpretations of much-loved novels, their wet-shirt Darcy, and their fiercely possessive relationship to their favorite author —are heirs to a tradition of Austen-love that stretches back to the early nineteenth century. Devoney Looser's brilliant detective work introduces us to a cast of creative, courageous, and eccentric women and men who helped keep Austen's work alive and vital into our own time."

"The Making of Jane Austen is a fascinating and often very funny account of how Austen became one of English literature's best-loved novelists. Devoney Looser has already made a reputation as one of her generation's foremost Austen scholars; here she takes her game to the next level."

"Exuberant and unfailingly entertaining, The Making of Jane Austen challenges many pieties about the woman novelist and her fame. Looking beyond the elite caretakers of Austen’s reputation, Looser helps us better appreciate the multiple, surprising ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences enjoyed, used, and adapted Austen’s books."

"A splendid and indispensable work for all readers interested in how Austen is not simply any old great author but a cultural icon who continues to evolve in fascinating and often conflicting ways."

"Energetic and revealing."

"One of the most fascinating sections... consequently takes in the wildly different approaches of [Austen’s] early illustrators."

"Looser is a sober and conscientiously corrective guide, constantly prompting us to historicise the conventional ways in which we conceive of Austen... This is a studious and sensible book, driven by a commitment to shedding light on Austen's work and context."

"Timely and authoritative."

"Austen fans have another book to add to their libraries."

"[Looser's] arguments are refreshing and balanced. The Making of Jane Austen lovingly unveils Austen's posthumous journey to become a permanent fixture in classic English literature."

"An informative and delightful read for literary lovers who want to learn more about one of the most celebrated authors of all time, The Making of Jane Austen puts the famed novelist in a whole new light."

"Looser's book is full of forgotten performances, artists, and remakes, showing that Austen has long been enlisted to play a variety of roles."

"The Making of Jane Austen presents a compelling history of how the phenomenon of 'Jane! Austen!' came to be..."

"Written with wit and in pleasing yet learned prose, the book bridges well the gap between academic and popular writing... Altogether, new information for scholars and fans and great fun. Highly recommended."

"The Making of Jane Austen is both an essential, rigorously researched text for serious Austen scholars and an irresistibly lively reading experience for even the most newly initiated of Janeites."

"[W]hat The Making of Jane Austen offers the reader is a brilliant narrative that ends in hope. The story of how Jane Austen became, in Looser's words, 'Jane! Austen!', is a meandering tale with unlikely participants, unexpected twists, and a great deal of humour."

"A groundbreaking effort to broaden the conversation about Austen's influence in terms of both content and audience, The Making of Jane Austen represents a major contribution to the fast-growing area of Austen reception studies and will be remembered as a book of the decade in Austen scholarship more generally."

"[A] fascinating new study of some of the ways Austen has been used by illustrators, actors, and activists."

"In this brilliant new view of Austen, Devoney Looser tells us as much about what we want and need from our literary celebrities as [she] does about 'Aunt Jane' herself."

"The book offers insightful close reading of several nineteenth-century illustrations of Austen’s fiction."

"Clearly organized into sections that dive deeply into the illustrated, the dramatized, and the politicized Austen as well as Austen pedagogy, from the first dissertation to the McGuffey Reader, The Making of Jane Austen provides a review of how Austen's image was shaped and shifted over time by those who marketed her work in books, films, and texts. Looser also looks at how both anti-suffrage men and suffragettes used Austen to prop up their viewpoint as people continue to look to Austen for conservative and liberal ideas. It seems Austen is almost biblical in her ability to be all things to all people."

"Devoney Looser's delightfully discontinuous history signals straightaway the materiality of its Subject and its place between scholarly and popular mythologies. More subtly, it coaxes the reader to confront her own self in the act of 'making' Austen... Her inclusive, imaginative account is an important marker in the critical turn toward 'matters of fact,' building upon work by Janine Barchas, Claudia Johnson, and Kathryn Sutherland that historicizes Austen's referential texts, their reception, and her gradual institutionalization."

"Devoney Looser's latest full-scale contribution to Austen studies is an original, important and well-written book. It is valuable for the highly unusual areas she studies, for information about and clear descriptions of texts probably unknown to many Austen scholars and/or Janeites alike (this is a feat), for the critical intelligence and close reading she applies to some of these; and, for her tales of poignant lives of a few people who ought to be remembered for the significant contribution they made to the ways many people read Austen's texts today."

"Looser's book gives us a much-needed historical perspective, showing that the most cutting-edge and the most retrograde interpretations of Austen have a deeper history than we have imagined."

"Looser's book reminds us both how much invention has always been involved in creating Austen's literary reputation, and how frequently that invention has involved suppressing or distorting the voices of women and others who are not part of the dominant discourse. It is therefore also an important contribution to feminist scholarship more broadly, and to the growing body of scholarship that attempts to hear and recuperate the voices of the marginalized and oppressed."

"Eminently readable and suitably polemical in places, The Making of Jane Austen will be of supreme interest not only to Austen scholars but to anyone seeking a fit model for unpicking the formation of a literary or historical reputation... With an enviable gift for marshalling unwieldy anecdotes, Looser has with outstanding energy and rigor traversed such places like no one else before her."