Jane Austen The Banker’s Sister By E. J. Clery

KeskusteluI Love Jane Austen

Liity LibraryThingin jäseneksi, niin voit kirjoittaa viestin.

Jane Austen The Banker’s Sister By E. J. Clery

Tämä viestiketju on "uinuva" —viimeisin viesti on vanhempi kuin 90 päivää. Ryhmä "virkoaa", kun lähetät vastauksen.

1Chawton
toukokuu 23, 2017, 11:37 am

Note that this book will be published on 25 May 2017. I will review it here soon after. In the meantime, here is what the publisher (Biteback) have to say about it:

When it was announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new £10 note in 2017, few were aware that a £10 Austen banknote already existed – issued by her favourite brother. Handsome, clever and enterprising, Henry Austen founded a bank business and charmed his way into the top rank of aristocratic society before going spectacularly bust in the financial crash of 1816. He left an enduring legacy, however, for it was Henry who supported Jane’s dream of becoming a published author.

Literary critic and cultural historian E. J. Clery presents a radically new vision of the much-loved novelist, revealing how her works were shaped by an acute awareness of the economic scandals, crises and speculations that marked the Regency era.

Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister provides a fascinating reappraisal of the political connections and economic interests of the Austen family, and an engaging exploration of the bond between brother and sister. It will change the way Jane Austen’s life and novels are understood.

Henry Austen had set up as a banker in 1804, and built up a small empire of country banks. But Henry went unmentioned, for the good reason that he had gone spectacularly bust in the crash of 1816, the year before Jane died. A fascinating figure in his own right, highly revealing of the corruption and decadence as well as the inequality and the desperation that characterised the Regency period, Henry was intimately connected to the centres of power in high society. The history of his rise and fall, moreover, consistently informed Jane's publishing career and imaginative life as a novelist.

Henry acted as her agent, her first reader and her literary executor. For a time, the pair lived together in London, with Jane enjoying her brother's sophisticated and hedonistic way of life. Versions of Henry appear throughout her novels, not least in the charming but unscrupulous Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, master of the fashionable card game 'Speculation'. In the last novels, Jane worked through her increasing doubts about the speculative mindset and the shock caused by the collapse of Henry's enterprise.

Exploring the close parallels between the speculative political economy of the late eighteenth century and the present day, Jane Austen: The Banker's Sister counters the stereotype of the spinster tucked away in a Hampshire village, detached from the great historical changes of her era. Based on wholly new research, including sensational new evidence of Henry's entanglements in the dissolute circle around the Prince Regent, this fascinating new volume will change the way Austen's life and her novels are understood.

Hardback, 368 pages
ISBN: 9781785901768
Publication date: 25 May 2017