Jane Austen Books You May Not Have Discovered Yet

So what's your favorite Jane Austen?

People take Jane Austen personally: she's all about us. Readers and moviegoers line up behind their heroine of choice with the fierce ambition to be special that little girls bring to telling you their favorite color ("I used to like pink, but magenta..."). As I show in my new book, "Why Jane Austen?," most fans identify with brilliant Elizabeth, over-confident Emma, or exquisitely sensitive Anne--and simultaneously with the novelist herself.

The heroine of "Northanger Abbey" is not so popular, maybe because the title is hard to pronounce, maybe because the novel wasn't re-made for television until 2007, but probably because Catherine Morland doesn't have much in the way of an identity. The narrator writes that no one would take her for a heroine--and then throws a hero in her path and makes her one.

To look beyond the big three Austen novels most often read and adapted is to find unexpected pleasures. So you think you know Jane Austen? Here are some works you may not have discovered yet...

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"Northanger Abbey"

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Catherine is just a normal, healthy 17-year-old, plain, provincial, and naïve, when she gets plucked out of her large family to keep a tedious woman company in a vacation spot. There she is introduced to a clever young man who likes her because she admires him. Due to a misunderstanding, she gets moved to the kind of spooky houses she reads about in novels, but danger is averted and she finds perfect happiness in the end. Romance or anti-romance? Critics are divided.

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Catherine is just a normal, healthy 17-year-old, plain, provincial, and naïve, when she gets plucked out of her large family to keep a tedious woman company in a vacation spot. There she is introduced to a clever young man who likes her because she admires him. Due to a misunderstanding, she gets moved to the kind of spooky houses she reads about in novels, but danger is averted and she finds perfect happiness in the end. Romance or anti-romance? Critics are divided.

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danny saunders said on 28 Tuesday 2011 pm30 9:38 pm: I love Northanger Abbey! It's an all time favorite.

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Eh, this looks boring I want to read this!

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Comments

[chicamorena]

11:24 AM on 07/18/2011

Whoa!! How on earth did they leave out "The Watsons"? That would have been one of her best if only she had finished it.

[trav45]

08:40 AM on 07/01/2011

This is my FAVORITE Austen book! Hilarious!

[Andrew Lohr]

08:31 PM on 06/30/2011

P&P I considered a not very special romance (and I think Austen thought the same). Mansfield Park I liked better: it set out a view of the world. Proved Austen could think. Have only read those two.

[chicamorena]

11:34 AM on 07/18/2011

MP is excellent. I only wish they would do a film version that did it justice. So far there have been three movie versions of MP, each one worse than the last.

[Lev Raphael]

08:51 AM on 06/29/2011

I'm wild about Northanger Abbey because I read it in senior year of college right after a heavy dose of Ann Radcliffe and getting all her digs at Terror Gothic made it even funnier. It still holds up with the kind of genius you find in Cakes and Ale.

[LibrarianBarb]

08:14 AM on 06/29/2011

The most underrated major Austen work: Northanger Abbey
The best adaptation on film: The Amanda Root 'Persuasion'
The best book adaptation: Lady Vernon and Her Daughter (adapted from 'Lady Susan')
The most underappreciated juvenile work: The Three Sisters - LOL

[spartanmom]

07:50 AM on 06/29/2011

For those interested there are some Georgette Heyer novels that have some of the fun of JA. Granted, they are more on the fluffy side but she does characters well and gets her social history straight.

[arkymorgan]

08:47 PM on 06/29/2011

That was how I introduced my sister-in-law to Austen. She liked those trashy Harlequin-style regencies, so I turned her on to Heyer...it's a pretty easy step from there!

[lilyhammer]

10:09 PM on 06/28/2011

Jane Austen was as brilliant a novelist as Shakespeare was a dramatist. Pride and Prejudice is as brilliant a novel as Hamlet is a play.
Ironically, because Ms. Austen basically invented the modern novel, she seems conventional. However, the most cursory reading of the novels she hilariously sends up in Northanger Abbey shows that her contemporaries hadn't any idea how to meld characters and action into a convincing plot. Or that a theme wasn't a series of badly-written speeches. They created characters either perfect or evil and then shoved them around incredible plots like marionettes. At every opportunity, they hit readers over the head with the moral.
The genius of Ms. Austen was to introduce desire into the novel, ending clumsy characterization, melodramatic plots, and undigested object lessons for anybody who wanted to be taken seriously as writer. For example, instead of Clarissa which, in lieu of a plot, insists we admire the silly, hypocritical troublemaker of a title character, we get Elizabeth and Miss Bingley who conflict for the realistic reason that they're both competing for a handsome, well-bred, and well-off husband. Because they want the same thing, neither is wholly bad or good: like life but more interesting.
Furthermore, unlike her contemporaries, Ms. Austen was a brilliant stylist. She wrote beautiful sentences, sharp characterizations, masterful dialogue, and perfectly designed plots. In contrast, try Moll Flanders, which is thinly plotted, repetitive, and almost without dialogue.
Jane Austen made the novel, period. She can't be overrated.

[eskatyt]

10:36 PM on 06/28/2011

Brava. Well said. Austen is the best.

[sabelmouse]

07:02 AM on 06/29/2011

yes, yes ,yes and yes. f and f.

[danny saunders]

09:38 PM on 06/28/2011

I love Northanger Abbey! It's an all time favorite.

[Arnie Perlstein]

08:57 PM on 06/28/2011

"The heroine of "Northanger Abbey" is not so popular, maybe because the title is hard to pronounce, maybe because the novel wasn't re-made for television until 2007, but probably because Catherine Morland doesn't have much in the way of an identity. The narrator writes that no one would take her for a heroine--and then throws a hero in her path and makes her one."

The above is a description of the superficial parody in Northanger Abbey, but there is a deeper, "shadow" anti-parody, in which it is Catherine Morland who enlightens Henry Tilney about the horrors that _do_ exist in every English family:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/05/general-tilney-as-bluebeard-murdering.html

and there is much much more to the feminist anti-parody in Northanger Abbey!

Cheers, ARNIE PERLSTEIN

[spartanmom]

07:47 AM on 06/29/2011

Interesting.
I'll keep it in mind next time I read NA.
The Emma baby as well.
Is there a single post that outlines your shadow stories or will I have to wait for the book?

[smpj]

04:06 PM on 06/28/2011

Reading Jane Austin or watching any of the many exceptional film adaptations of her work is one of life's great pleasures.

[sabelmouse]

07:03 AM on 06/29/2011

not the one with keira kneightly

[millebocca]

09:20 AM on 06/29/2011

si si
least fave to date

[eilish]

04:51 PM on 06/29/2011

Very odd, wasn't it? I loved Matthew McFadyen in the MI-5 series, but only watched this version a couple of times - for the music. Then I put it on my iPhone.

[Prince Tonne]

03:02 PM on 06/28/2011

I love the juvenilia. You can already see 13-year-old Jane playing with narrative conventions in ways that escape most adults.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I still haven't got round to reading Sanditon.

[Arnie Perlstein]

09:31 PM on 06/28/2011

Read the Sanditon fragment, read the fragment of The Watsons, and most of all read her letters very very carefully, they are also of the greatest interest to Janeites, if you read between the lines.

[chicamorena]

11:25 AM on 07/18/2011

I couldn't stand Sanditon, but The Watsons is a gem. If only she had completed it...

[imoverit]

02:51 PM on 06/28/2011

Love all of Austen's works and reread them each summer. Mansfield Park is my favorite novel and the Masterpiece Classic 2008 Sense and Sensibility is my favorite adaptation. I also love Persuasion, both the book and the adaptation - just wish she had written a couple hundred more pages. On any given day, I can identify with each of her characters, and learn, not only more about them, but about myself.

[sabelmouse]

07:05 AM on 06/29/2011

they did an amazing job with s and s. you mean the emma thompson/ ang lee one right. [ no wait 2008 ? ]
how good that is and how bad the latest p and p.

[imoverit]

12:50 PM on 06/29/2011

The 2008 S & S version was on PBS as a miniseries. I saw it via Netflix. IMO, it gives a truer representation of the characters, particularly Marianne. I hope you get a chance to see it.

[eilish]

04:56 PM on 06/29/2011

I love them all! The 1981 version stars Irene Richard and Tracy Childs, and I do love it because these actresses just LOOK the part so much better than the others. Edward was a bit of a lump, though.

[LibrarianBarb]

08:15 AM on 07/01/2011

I agree that the 2008 Sense and Sensibility is excellent and overlooked. I thought it was cast better than the 1995 version (Ang Lee) as well as doing a much better job of developing the character of Brandon.

[imoverit]

11:19 PM on 07/01/2011

I agree about Brandon and also think Marianne's character was much more believable, and truer to Ms. Austen's intention for the character, than the Ang Lee version.

[kareemachan]

01:02 PM on 06/28/2011

Loved 'Northanger Abbey' and Austen's ever-so-delicate tongue-in-cheek spoofing of gothic novels.

[sabelmouse]

12:55 PM on 06/28/2011

i love syrie james' the lost memoirs of jane austen. i swear i had moments when i thought things like '' oh that's why she wrote that '' .

[Flor Arellano]

11:56 AM on 06/28/2011

Wow, I had no idea of the last three books, now I will set out to read them!