Romney invites readers to join her on a thrilling journey of adventure and self-discovery as she reads these books and delves into the stories of their authors ... Romney, who prides herself on being the Sherlock Holmes of the rare-book-dealer set, headed out into the wilderness of literary history, eyes peeled, looking for villains and hidden trails and secrets, slashing through forests of lies, rushing past false turns, gleefully knocking experts off their thrones, figuring out truths, and learning whom to trust ... It is a meditation on reading and writing, on honesty and self-discovery — and on what books can teach us, if we let them.
Would seem optimized for readers who like to absorb their masterpieces by osmosis. Yet it springs from a place more personal and idiosyncratic than the cozy title might suggest. Put it another way: I certainly didn’t expect to make so many furious notes in the margins ... Stirred some emotions of my own. My penciled exhortations in the margins, some of excitement or communion, others of irritation, are in a way a response to Romney’s invitation to join in her intellectual tussling.
Romney has traversed this ground: Her bibliography and endnotes fill the book’s final hundred pages. But she brings to the works the distinctive insights of a rare-book dealer and finds clues to her mysteries in the physical books themselves ... An excellent introduction to Austen’s favorite novelists, but Ms. Romney is more than a cheerleader.
Exhaustive ... Some of this is new; some of it isn’t ... By and large, though, Romney has built her case for the women writers inextricable to Austen’s formation the old-fashioned way, by reconstructing what Austen read and making space on her own shelves according to those recalibrations.
Brilliant stuff – a bold bit of canon jujitsu, sparked by the simplest of questions, leading to the most enraging of conclusions, but driven by...sheer pleasure ... Romney’s book is as sharp an examination of the “great forgetting” of female writers as you could wish for, uncowed by big-name critics, buoyed instead by the instincts of a single reader trusting her honest enjoyment over dusty tradition.
An extraordinary book ... The potential readership for this book is not limited to Austen fans—of which there are legions—but also to those interested in the work of women writers and others interested in learning about what influenced one of the most famous writers.
