Chawton House’s digital living room reopens for the Autumn/Winter season with the first of a series of digital events for our Jane Austen Book Club.

Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

Devoney Looser

You may have thought Jane Austen was a quiet spinster, but Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest. Tracing the author's life and legacy across 250 years, she reveals an Austen far wilder than the one we know.

Looser takes a deep dive into Austen's work, offering fresh insights into her six completed novels, as well as her juvenilia, unfinished fiction, essays, and poetry. She also reveals new information about Austen's relationship to the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage. Examining the author's legacy, she turns up extraordinary stories about ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in court, and the eclectic members of the Austen family, whose own outrageous lives are wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth and humour, and filled with remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to one of the world's most beloved novelists.

About the Author:

Devoney Looser is the author or editor of ten books, including The Making of Jane Austen (2017), a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and a Guggenheim Fellow, a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She plays roller derby as 'Stone Cold Jane Austen'.

Tickets: £6 | £50 season ticket to all JABC events onsite and online.