A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

For so many of us a Jane Austen novel is much more than the epitome of a great read. It is a delight and a solace, a challenge and a reward, and perhaps even an obsession. For two centuries Austen has enthralled readers. Few other authors can claim as many fans or as much devotion. So why are we so fascinated with her novels? What is it about her prose that has made Jane Austen so universally beloved?

In essays culled from the last one hundred years of criticism juxtaposed with new pieces by some of today’s most popular novelists and essayists, Jane Austen’s writing is examined and discussed, from her witty dialogue to the arc and sweep of her story lines. Great authors and literary critics of the past offer insights into the timelessness of her moral truths while highlighting the unique confines of the society in which she composed her novels. Virginia Woolf examines Austen’s maturation as an artist and speculates on how her writing would have changed if she’d lived twenty more years, while C. S. Lewis celebrates Austen’s mirthful, ironic take on traditional values.

Modern voices celebrate Austen’s amazing legacy with an equal amount of eloquence and enthusiasm. Fay Weldon reads Mansfield Park as an interpretation of Austen’s own struggle to be as “good” as Fanny Price. Anna Quindlen examines the enduring issues of social pressure and gender politics that make Pride and Prejudice as vital today as ever. Alain de Botton praises Mansfield Park for the way it turns Austen’s societal hierarchy on its head. Amy Bloom finds parallels between the world of Persuasion and Austen’s own life. And Amy Heckerling reveals how she transformed the characters of Emma into denizens of 1990s Beverly Hills for her comedy Clueless. From Harold Bloom to Martin Amis, Somerset Maugham to Jay McInerney, Eudora Welty to Margot Livesey, each writer here reflects on Austen’s place in both the literary canon and our cultural imagination.

We read, and then reread, our favorite Austen novels to connect with both her world and our own. Because, as A Truth Universally Acknowledged so eloquently demonstrates, the only thing better than reading a Jane Austen novel is finding in our own lives her humor, emotion, and love.
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Talking About Detective Fiction

In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it. P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—and of the detective hero—in recent years. There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.

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Just Passin' Thru: A Vintage Store, the Appalachian Trail, and a Cast of Unforgettable Characters

By Winton Porter
"Collects true accounts about the well-known Appalachian Trail trading post Mountain Crossings and its patrons, in a volume that shares the author's experiences of helping visitors to reunite with loved ones, make chili or otherwise prepare for the 2,200-mile path from Georgia to Maine."
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The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship

The Girls From Ames grew in response to a piece Zaslow wrote about the enduring bonds of women's friendships. He received an email from Jenny Benson Litchman that gave a few details on how the girls met (three were born within a week of each other in a local hospital), what growing up together had been like, and how they still keep in almost daily contact with each other.

Intrigued, Zaslow took a year's leave from work to spend time with the "girls," hoping, no doubt, to find the key to what has kept them so close for so many years. Instead, he discovered what many women could have told him: the friends of one's youth are often the friends who matter the most. They are the ones with whom a million secrets have been shared, fragile dreams have been explored and countless pranks have been pulled. These are the friends who know the best and the worst about each other and, as English poet Robert Southey wrote, they are completely persuaded of each other's worth.

Still, it is extraordinary how these women (10 now, since the early death of one) have maintained such close contact with each other despite lives that have taken them all across the country (none lives in Ames today). They've shared the joys of marriage and childbirth, the pain of divorce, the tragedy of the deaths of children, the fears surrounding breast cancer. They've cried oceans of tears together and laughed so hard they've wet their pants. Or as Cathy says in The Girls of Ames, when asked why their bond remains so strong: "We root each other to the core of who we are, rather than what defines us as adults—by careers or spouses or kids. There's a young girl in each of us who is still full of life. When we're together, I try to remember that."

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Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us About Work and Family

By Karine Moe
"Over the past 15 years, many highly educated, middle-class women have—whether by inclination or necessity—traded their 50-plus–hour workweeks and considerable paychecks to stay home with their children and enjoy a "saner, less hectic life." Economist Moe and anthropologist Shandy, both of Macalester College, dispassionately dissect the statistics and motivations behind "opting out" to determine whether this recent, still narrow trend denotes a "bellwether," a "fin-de-sicle folly" or just a blip on the cultural radar. The authors also demonstrate how these women differ from the 1950s housewife stereotype. Liberally used economic statistics describe financial sacrifices, potential marital shifts in power and ways to avoid the automatic social invisibility conferred on stay-at-home mothers, while well-placed anecdotes from study subjects weigh flexibility and quality of life for family members. There's no discussion of how recession-proof this trend will be, but this objective analysis provides a calmly informative, readable tool, useful for any couple considering children. "
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India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z

By Clive Limpkin
"Retired photojournalist Clive Limpkin traveled to India with his wife for a surprise birthday party. Having heard endless stories about the overwhelming poverty, glacial bureaucracy, and hygienic horrors, what he didn't expect was for the country to surprise him with utter delight. Within twelve hours of landing, he writes in the introduction, he and his wife were "hooked," and spent the next three years crisscrossing the continent. Questions from friends back home got them started on how to define the country. Yes, it was "overloaded, overpopulated, overcooked." There was the garbage, the begging, the red tape. But for all that there were one billion great reasons to visit: the people. As Limpkin writes, "It was not the scenery, nor the wildlife, nor the colors, nor the anarchistic madness than made us fall for the country, but the number of Indians who, with little to their name, still smile in greeting.""
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The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation

A group portrait of leading civil rights activists who comprised the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee draws on original sources to illuminate their challenges to American perspectives on human rights, politics and moral obligation.
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