Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Natalie Jenner

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

309 pages, published May 26, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Jane Austen Society takes place in the small village of Chawton, England (the final home of Jane Austen), just after the Second World War.  An unlikely group that includes the local town doctor and young teacher (both recently widowed), a bachelor farmer, the middle aged woman who stands to inherit the manor house and Austen’s cottage and her family’s lawyer (a spurned old flame), a Sotheby’s estate agent, and a glamorous Hollywood star come together in a quest to preserve Austen’s legacy and form the Jane Austen Society.

Quotes 

“Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion.”

 

“And, yes, sadly, no one else can ever understand your loss. It belongs to you. It impacts only you. And guess what? They don’t need to understand.” Mimi paused. “But you do. You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them.”

 

“We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out.”

 

“Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure—of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end.”

 

“Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austin saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austin knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius – – a genius no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own – – she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast soley by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.”

 

“Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world.”

 

“The humanity—the love for people—mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.”

 

“During the Great War, shell-shocked soldiers had been encouraged to read Jane Austen in particular—Kipling had coped with the loss of his soldier son by reading her books aloud to his family each night—Winston Churchill had recently used them to get through the Second World War.”

 

“Reading Jane Austen was making him identify with Darcy and the thunderclap power of physical attraction that flies in the face of one’s usual judgment.”

 

 “some of us are given too much to bear, and this burden is made worse by the hidden nature of that toll, a toll that others cannot even begin to guess at.”

 

“That there might be a place where people were not constantly competing against each other for their very sustenance, but were instead helping each other survive through war and injury and poverty and pain, seemed as much something out of a Jane Austen novel as anything else she could have hoped to find.”

 

“I always find it interesting how Jane Austen’s fans are always romantics to some degree – when I swear she wrote those books with a goose quill dipped in venom.”

 

“It’s no magic prescription, but it’s a start. Reading is wonderful, but it does keep us in our heads. It’s why I can’t read certain authors when I am in low spirits.”

 

“Frances had retreated into these familiar worlds of literature. Something about her favourite books gave her tremendous comfort, and even a strange feeling of control, although she could not quite put her finger on why. She just knew that she did not want to invest her time trying to figure out a new world, whom to like and whom to trust in it, and how to bear the author’s choices for tragedy and closure—or lack thereof.”

 

“Mimi shook her head sadly at the young widow. “Adeline, my father killed himself when I was very young, and it impacts me even as we sit here. It is a part of me, that awful, irrevocable act. And I am never going to be quite whole again because of it. You are not the problem: the loss is.”

 

“It had been nearly seven years, and for the longest time he thought he had been giving something to her by indulging his grief.”

 

“part of it was the heroism of Austen herself, in writing through illness and despair, and facing her own early death. If she could do it, Dr. Gray and Adeline each thought, then certainly, in homage if nothing else, they could, too.”

My Take

The Jane Austen Society is a delightful book.  Author Natalie Jenner seamlessly weaves the plots of several Jane Austen books, most notably Pride and Prejudice, into the lives of the charming characters in this work of historical fiction.  I loved spending time in the world of post World War II Chawton, England and was sad to see the book end, but gratified by the clever way everything worked out just right in the end.