Claudia Johnson, _Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures_

JOHNSON'S JANE AUSTEN: Women, Politics, and the Novel would be my pick for the best book on Austen's fiction. This one, from 2012, like the Brownstein and Looser books discussed earlier, is more about the reception of the fiction than the fiction itself. It's learned but witty and light on its feet--Johnson is a really good writer.

The book tracks how love of the novels turns into love of their author--or our idea of their author--and how that love turns into a quest for images and relics. Portraits of Austen get an excellent chapter, which is mainly about the transmogrifications of Cassandra's pencil and watercolor sketch (surprisingly, for me, Johnson turns out to be inclined to accept as genuine the "Rice portrait").  The final chapter, likewise excellent, is on the fetishization--she doesn't call it that, but she is a bit of a balloon-popper--of Chawton Cottage.

My favorite chapters were "Jane Austen's World War I" and "Jane Austen's World War II," which mapped the Austen-fandom world of the first half of the 20th century, back when it was mainly defined by men, strange as that seems now. Johnson talks about Kipling's great story "The Janeites," of course, but also spends some time on Reginald Farrer's essay written for the first centenary of Austen's death in 1917. Johnson's account was so intriguing that I dug up Farrer's essay (it's in the second volume of B. C. Southam's Critical Heritage collection) and it is well worth the digging up.

Even though the book is not mainly about the fiction, brilliant aperçus about the novels pop up every few pages--e.g., "No realistic novelist is less interested than Austen in the minutiae of physical description" (163). I had no idea, until Johnson told me, that Austen never mentions tea sets.