The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas Gill Ballinger The Lost Books of Jane Austen. By Janine Barchas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2019. xvi+284 pp. $35. ISBN 978–1–4214–3159–8. It is not unusual for Jane Austen scholars to own multiple editions of her novels—six Oxford World’s Classics, a nearly thirty-year-old birthday present, sit alongside [End Page 116] many other versions of her fiction on my bookshelves—but Janine Barchas possesses an unusually large number. She has found a remarkable number of cheap Austen paperbacks by scouring second-hand bookshops, eBay, and other places. These texts, alongside those of other collectors, have inspired her to rethink common assumptions about Austen, and form the basis of her fine new monograph, The Lost Books of Jane Austen. The book is her second on Austen; her first, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), asserts that the writer used real-life surnames and places in her fiction in culturally specific ways. This second monograph on Austen is another ground-breaking work: by proving that ‘before [Austen] was great, she was popular’ (p. xv), Barchas encourages readers to rethink the writer’s reception history in her revisionist argument that cheap versions of the fiction made Austen a popular novelist, not the exclusive writer the expensive editions might suggest. The Lost Books of Jane Austen provides an exhaustive history of inexpensive nineteenth- and twentieth-century reprints of Austen’s novels in Britain and beyond, showing how the writer’s popularity with ordinary readers led to her canonicity. The book is beautifully illustrated with many reproductions from the cheap works Barchas discusses. The Introduction suggests that the standard bibliographers have told only a partial version of the published works, since they do not include the cheap reprints that Barchas is interested in. Each chapter considers a different aspect of these lost books, and they are interspersed with vignettes detailing individual editions and owners. The first chapter examines the existence of paperback Austens in Britain and America from the 1840s to the 1940s. Barchas demonstrates that in Britain, from 1847 onwards, Austen’s novels appeared very cheaply, selling at railway stations from one to two shillings; by the end of the Victorian period, they were published for as little as a penny, making her ‘the People’s Jane’ (p. 44). In the second chapter, Barchas reveals that a Lever Brothers version of Sense and Sensibility was one of several prizes given to working- and middle-class consumers in the 1890s for collecting soap wrappers. This and subsequent chapters disclose that stereotype plates were passed between publishers to create different, cheap versions of essentially the same editions. In the third chapter, Barchas examines how reprints of Austen’s work have been associated with religion in Britain in the nineteenth century and America in the early twentieth: for example, her novels were given as prizes in Sunday schools. Chapter 4 considers the cover illustrations of cheap Austens in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from fine art to stills from film adaptations. The final chapter, on pink Austen, proves how she becomes increasingly marketed for women in Europe and America from the 1940s onwards. The vignettes give a personal dimension to these lost books: owners are predominantly British, and the final one detailing twelve-year-old Annie Munro’s school attendance prize of Northanger Abbey is particularly touching: this working-class girl died of diphtheria, most likely after giving the book to her sister Florence and inscribing her name on the beloved copy before her death. This is the only record of truly working-class owners; the other vignettes detail more genteel readers, for [End Page 117] example the rich Charlotte Mills and titled Lady Isabella St John. Given that the book argues forcefully for Austen’s democratic reach, it might have been beneficial if Barchas had been able to find a larger number of working-class owners for these vignettes. Overall, this is an excellent, pioneering book that offers irrefutable evidence that the Victorian public read Austen, contrary to the claim of...