Book: WILD FOR AUSTEN: A REBELLIOUS, SUBVERSIVE, AND UNTAMED JANE
Author: Devoney Looser
Published by: St. Martin’s Press
Price: $30
Jane Austen has survived centuries of interpretation, both reverent and reductive. She has been cast at times as a genteel chronicler of manners and, at other times, as a proto-feminist. Devoney Looser’s book thus joins a long line of literary attempts to reclaim Austen from the myths that surround her. Looser’s argument is simple: the image of Austen as a decorous spinster should be replaced by one that foregrounds her unruly intelligence and enduring power to unsettle conventions.
The book traces Austen’s ‘wildness’ across three sections — in fiction, in life, and in posthumous reputation. The first section dissects the female characters in novels like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Looser argues that Austen’s heroines, especially Elizabeth Bennet, display a spirited defiance that disturbed early nineteenth-century ideals of docility and restraint. Elizabeth’s “almost wild” energy, once treated as an affront to propriety, is reframed as a celebration of independence and wit. These readings are engaging, even though Looser’s focus on ‘wildness’ borders on cataloguing rather than illuminating analysis.
The second section is more interesting, examining Austen’s family and milieu and resurrecting relatives who rarely feature in genteel biographies: a kleptomaniac aunt tried for shoplifting, a cousin executed during the French Revolution, a family friend suspected of espionage. These anecdotes dismantle the myth of Austen as an isolated observer of polite society and place her instead in a world alive with scandal, politics, and moral complexity. Readers familiar with Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life or Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen will recognise this effort to humanise her by bringing alive the lively contradictions of her social world.
The final section, “Shambolic Afterlives”, is the most eclectic. It traces how later generations have made Austen alternately saintly and scandalous: the ghost sightings, the erotica, the unrealised film scripts, the reimaginings — from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Bridgerton. Looser’s enthusiasm for Austen’s modern incarnations sometimes blurs the line between analysis and indulgence. A stronger editorial hand might have imposed more selectivity here.
What emerges, however, is a portrait of Austen as one who tested the boundaries of gender, class, and good taste. In this, the book aligns with the works of scholars like Claudia Johnson whose Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel placed Austen within the political discourse of her time. But the book’s ambition occasionally exceeds the evidence it provides in support of its views. The notion of ‘wildness’ stretches so wide that almost any act of imagination or irony is qualified as wild. Yet even in its unevenness, Wild for Austen reminds readers that the author of Emma and Persuasion was, beneath the manners, a writer with ‘mud on her hem’ and rebellion in her pen.