Jones Library's Jane Austen's Regency World Book Club Reading List

"The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves under their rabbi father's iron fist to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah--according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less...

An account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts...

15-year-old Cher, the matchmaking Beverly Hills High schooler, has shopping and boys on her mind. She leads a hectic lifestyle but keeps it all together until she starts to fall in love and finds she's 'clueless'. A loose adaptation of Emma, Jane Austen's 19th-century comedy of manners.

Elizabeth Gaskell's episodic second novel, sometimes dismissed as nostalgically "charming," is now considered by many critics to be her most sophisticated work. The country town of Cranford is home to a group of women, affectionately called "Amazons" by the narrator, whose seemingly uneventful lives are full of conflicts, failures, and unexpected connections. A rich commentary on Victorian culture by one of its most astute observers, Cranford owes...

"Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee, Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With...

"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

The story of the friendship between two women--one the less-than-perfect clergyman's wife, the other younger and unmarried.

Nearly two centuries after her death, Jane Austen remains the most beloved of novelists in the English language, incomparable in the wit, warmth and insight with which she chronicles the wayward hearts of her unforgettable characters. Her work also offers a vivid depiction of rural life in late Georgian and Regency England, its country balls and ivy-covered vicarages, its social hierarchies and its anxieties about property and income. Yet the milieu...

"These three short works from across Jane Austen's career show her writing in a variety of styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of classes and setting. The early epistolary novel Lady Susan depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with several men. The Watsons is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine finds her marriage opportunities restricted by poverty and pride. Written in the last months of Austen's life, the tantalizing...