Jane Austen

A Very Short Introduction

By: Tom Keymer

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of works unpublished in her day, including three volumes of witty, non-realist juvenilia and the innovative, unfinished, Sanditon. She pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and was a penetrating satirist of social tensions and trends. Yet Austen struggled for many years to break into print, and even as she became a published author in the last years of her relatively short life, reading tastes and book-trade expectations constrained as much as they enabled her literary career.

This Very Short introduction explores the major themes of Austen criticism through close analysis of her major and minor works, with particular emphasis on the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which the novels emerge, and with which they engage. Thomas Keymer combines critical introductions to each of Austen's six major novels with an exploration of the key themes in her works. The Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of the revolution decade, drawn in her maturity to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through the disruptive ironies and satirical energies of her prose.

©2022 Tom Keymer (P)2022 Tantor

Four Hours of Genius

Without a doubt, Tom Keymer's short introduction to Jane Austen is the best critical overview of Jane Austen's writing and life available on Audible. It is both more scholarly and original than Lucy Worsley's "Jane Austen at Home", much more insightful and educational than Devoney Looser's "The Life and Work of Jane Austen" (the great courses), and more knowledgeable than Elizabeth Jenkins' "Jane Austen: a life"(Naxos) -- titles you will find here on audible.
What makes this study better than these titles concerns precision, detail, and structure. Each of the seven chapters focuses one of Austen's six famous novels and connects it to a theme of central importance in Austen studies. Chapter 3, for example, reads "Sense and Sensibility" in the light of Regency social conduct, gender, feeling, self-control, and economic precarity, while chapter 4 looks at "Pride and Prejudice" in terms of Austen's writing style and engagement with contemporary narrative techniques. This book will give you a strong understanding of Austen's writing, its complexity, and significance.