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Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels
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Published:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description

One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020

"A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another." —The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)


"A
n absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live
"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen's novels.
Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer's relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen's novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father's last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father's legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.
With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen's life and literature, and guided by Austen's mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen's Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.

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Format:
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Street Date:
07/21/2020
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780374720827
ASIN:
B07Y73JWHS
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cohen. (2020). Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cohen. 2020. Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cohen. Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize, and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, which was longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.
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fullDescription

One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020

"A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another." —The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)


"A
n absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live
"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen's novels.
Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer's relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen's novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father's last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father's legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.
With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen's life and literature, and guided by Austen's mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen's Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Sophie Gee, The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)
      • content:

        "A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another . . . Austen Years is full of neat observations and provocative comparisons, folded into the story with a subtlety that keeps Cohen's sense from getting sententious."

      • premium: False
      • source: Marion Winik, The Washington Post
      • content: "Among the myriad passionate readers of Austen, who seem to produce dozens of new books about her every year, Cohen occupies a special place . . . Cohen writes with emotion and insight about her father and his death."
      • premium: False
      • source: Hillary Kelly, Los Angeles Times
      • content: "In this memoir-essay hybrid, Cohen reads and rereads Jane Austen's work and tells us not just what it all means but also what it does for us -- how the author's pin-sharp assessments and characters instruct us about the world. There isn't an ounce of kitsch or flowery claptrap. Instead, Cohen overlays a personal account of grieving her father with the help of Austen's fiction, emerging with one of the most emotionally astute understandings of the novelist's work, period."
      • premium: False
      • source: Steve Donoghue, The Christian Science Monitor
      • content: "Cohen has taken her fascination with – and personal dependence on – one great author and transmutes it into something any reader in the world will find downright marvelous . . . The book is at once an impressive analysis of Austen's fiction and a first-rate biography of the author herself. At its heart, however, this story is as much about the joy of reading as it is about anything else . . . a shining account of how indispensable books can be."
      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        February 1, 2020
        How Jane Austen's novels can guide readers through joy and grief. "Criticism and memoir have always been near neighbors," writes essayist and biographer Cohen (Creative Writing/Univ. of Chicago; Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, 2013, etc.); "the gift of a pronounced personal point of view leads to deeper readings, and to new ones." In a thoughtful meditation on the interweaving of literature and life, Cohen recounts her reading during years when her life altered dramatically: Her father died, she married, and her two children were born. Those profound experiences made her vibrantly alert to Austen's themes: "families and friendships and changing history, how we go back over what we have lived, and whether we can hand it on." Although Austen never married or had children, she "did not forget that her books would be read in rooms where babies had just been born, and where parents had breathed their last." Rooms, and the objects within them, reverberated with memories and life. Cohen brings to her analysis a thorough familiarity not only with Austen's unforgettable characters, but also with her critics and biographers, including the "restrained but insightful" memoir written by Austen's nephew. These works help her to contextualize the novels, which she analyzes with astute sensitivity. Austen's characters, in fact, emerge more vividly than many individuals from Cohen's own life. Except for her father, a kind, imaginative man "full of wit" and generosity, others remain shadowy: her mother, a theater director and teacher; Cohen's husband--their convoluted 15-year courtship, a friend remarked, seemed "very Jane Austen"; her sister, son, and daughter. Cohen's father was a professor whose research focused on organizations "and the ways people work and play together." The author remembers him laughing "with delight and with surprise," and she portrays the family's home as "a place of tenderness"--though it was not without mysteries (her father's sudden decision to give all their books away, for example) that, along with treasured memories, came to shape her reading. A nuanced portrait of a writer and reader.

        COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        February 17, 2020
        In this erudite if uneven exploration of connection and loss, essayist Cohen (A Chance Meeting) draws parallels between her own life and Jane Austen’s life and literary legacy. After Cohen’s aging father died, she fell into a depression as “the rhythm of days altered... the world careened”; seeking comfort, she turned to Austen’s novels and wondered, “Was this a retreat, a seclusion?” To cope with the death of her father, raising her two children, and her own uncertainty regarding her marriage and relationships, Cohen assigned specific titles to major events: Persuasion to the pregnancy and birth of her daughter, Sense and Sensibility to the aftermath of her father’s death, Pride and Prejudice to her pregnancy with her son, Mansfield Park to a move from New York to Chicago, and Emma to when she experienced the tug of parenthood and career. The works of Austen also soothe Cohen as she scatters her father’s ashes in his beloved city of Venice. Cohen’s writing at its best is lush and lyrical, though it can become dense with anecdotal biography, academic literary criticism, and passages of self-analysis. And readers not well versed in Austen will have a hard time finding their way in, despite the synopses Cohen provides. Despite its clever premise, this memoir adds little to the canon of Austen appreciations.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from June 1, 2020
        Without intending to, Cohen, the award-winning author of A Chance Meeting (2004) and Bernard Berenson (2013), found herself seeking comfort in reading and rereading Jane Austen's five complete novels. When her father became ill, and she was pregnant with her first child, Cohen found herself picking up, skimming, and putting down Austen's Persuasion almost compulsively, a little like checking in with a good friend for advice. While Persuasion may have been Cohen's "best friend" in the group, each Austen novel is appreciated in its turn for the insights into and reflections of the human condition it offers. This is a wondrous mix of memoir and biography as Cohen provides detailed portraits of Austen, her family, and their world and analyzes how this context inspired Austen's indelible novels. This is a book not to be hurried through but consumed in small portions and pondered over as it sparks introspection. The deep knowledge of and respect for Austen's novels will equally impress Austenites and readers less versed in her works, and all will appreciate the information found in Cohen's notes and bibliography. As readers absorb these pages, personal notes will be made and quotes shared.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        July 1, 2020

        Memoirist Cohen (A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists) juxtaposes elements of her personal history with the life and works of English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) to demonstrate the relevance of literary classics today. During a critical time in Cohen's life, spanning her children's births and her father's death, the author reread Austen as a way to cope with her grief. Here, she asserts that through Austen's novels we can feel more ourselves and see the world clearer. Cohen's relationship with her father is central to the text; one letter he wrote to her serves as a kind of passageway to Austen's themes. For instance, reflections on Sense and Sensibility are tied to the deaths of both Austen's father and Cohen's. Cohen further draws parallels between Austen's era and our own, making connections to historical events in the novels, including the Napoleonic Wars and the slave trade. Recognizing the link between memoir and literary criticism, Cohen references new memoirs and commentaries on Austen's works by scholars and writers such as Virginia Woolf. VERDICT A successful reminder of how time-honored literature evokes insight into our present reality and why the classics should be read more and often.--Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT

        Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020

"A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another." —The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)


"A
n absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live
"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult...

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