Completing Juliette Wells’ groundbreaking trio of books on Austen’s readers, this latest volume revolutionizes our understanding of how Austen came to be viewed as the world’s greatest novelist. Wells shows that Austen’s global reputation was established not by British scholars, as is commonly believed, but by visionary American writers and collectors, working largely outside academia.

Drawing on extensive research, Wells weaves together colorful, compelling case studies of men and women who, from the 1880s to the 1980s, helped readers appreciate Austen’s novels, persuasively advocated for her place in the literary canon, and preserved artifacts vital to her legacy.

Engagingly written and extensively illustrated, A New Jane Austen will inform and delight scholars and Austen fans alike.

About the Author: 

Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher College, is the author of two acclaimed books about Jane Austen’s historic readers and fans: Reading Austen in America and Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination. For Penguin Classics, she edited Austen’s Persuasion and Emma.