Published in 2020
304 pages
Rachel Cohen started publishing essays after she spent a year driving 19,000 miles around the country, trying to understand what it is to be an American writer, and mostly reading the crates of books she had in her trunk. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Best American Essays. She is a Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with her family.
What is this book about?
An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live
“About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author.”
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels.
Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen’s novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.
With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.
