“You see, but you do not observe.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
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It all started with a book that made me curious.
I was on a house call in Georgetown, invited to browse the personal book collection of a woman who used to be a professional rare book dealer like me. I spent the afternoon combing through her library. As the wind grazed the branches outside, the light within the room shifted, sparkling across the antique rug, the gently worn furniture, and the bookcases. Every shelf had been filled with books that quietly spoke to her discernment. Instead of a flashy modern edition of Pride and Prejudice, this woman had a rather ugly one, bound in drab brown paper boards resembling dilapidated cardboard. It also bore an unusual revised title, Elizabeth Bennet; or, Pride and Prejudice.
Despite its humble appearance, I knew the book was incredibly rare. It was the first edition of Pride and Prejudice published in the United States, from 1832. A woman who kept this book on her shelf knew a good book when she saw it, even if others around her might overlook it.
Jane Austen is one of my favorite writers. She was born in 1775 in the English countryside, Steventon, Hampshire, and went on to become “the first great women writer in English,” according to one of her many modern biographers. She wrote six major novels, along with a novella, two other incomplete novels, and what scholars call juvenilia (early writing she composed when she was growing up). I have always been drawn to Austen’s confidence, how she guides the reader through her heroines’ struggles and uncertainties. And I like her wit, which shines in the details she chooses to linger on. Austen died fairly young, at the age of forty-one, and I have often wished that she had lived to write more.
It didn’t even occur to me that there were women writers whom Austen had used as models—and whose books I could read, too.
But on that house call, it wasn’t Pride and Prejudice that made me curious. I have handled many different editions of Austen’s books over the years, including a wide variety of nineteenth-century ones. We would certainly purchase this copy. It was another shelf that drew my eye, one lined with a series of books that had been published during the 1890s and early 1900s by Macmillan in London, recognizable because of their stunning emerald-green cloth bindings and elaborate gilt spines. I took one glance and knew we’d make an offer on the entire collection. Offer accepted, we boxed up our acquisitions to transport back to the shop. The book that would change my life was lying within.
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A few months later, I sat at my desk and opened my laptop, ready to spend a few hours cataloging new acquisitions. Before a book is offered for sale, we rare book dealers record its physical attributes: Is it bound in cloth? Leather? Does it have any damage? Signs of previous ownership? We also often write a brief summary of its importance, drawing on the work of other experts in our field and surrounding fields—not just literary critics and biographers, but also book historians, or scholars who study the history of the book. We call the result a catalog description, which becomes our official documentation for that rare book.
On that day, I had plenty of options for which book I would catalog first. I am a maker of piles; this stack has books I’ve catalogued but not yet put online; that stack contains a few volumes I’ve pulled for our next newsletter of new arrivals; yet another stack came from that Georgetown house call. I looked toward the last stack of books. Three volumes down from the top sat a novel called Evelina by Frances Burney.
I had seen Burney’s name before, mostly on the spines of books at antiquarian book fairs in the UK. But I couldn’t recall any details of her life. I certainly hadn’t read any of her books. I had purchased this one primarily for the emerald-green cloth binding. Not all books are collected because they are first editions. Some are collected for their beauty. This one dated from 1903, a period when UK and US publishers commissioned artists to design eye-catching cloth bindings as a marketing tool (this, before dust jackets rose to dominance). The front board featured a woman poised with a quill pen, dressed in voluminous skirts and a plumed hat. She stood beneath a tree, clusters of leaves spreading across nearly half the binding, all stamped in gilt upon that rich, emerald-green background. Just like it had in the library in Georgetown, when the light hit it just right, it sparkled.
I have no problem admitting that I’ve bought books for their covers. But even when I do, I care about the story in the book—and the story of the book. I want to know what the book is about. What happens? How was it different than the stories that came before? How was it similar? I want to know about the author. Who was she? How did she come to be a writer? I want to know about the book itself. How was it made? What does that say about its publisher’s view of its target audience? I want to know about the book’s publication. What did people think about it then? What do they think of it now? I want to know where it has been. Who owned this book? How did they care for it (or not)? Why was it saved for so long? To be a rare book dealer is to appreciate that the book itself—the object can be as interesting as its text.
I’ve made a career out of that curiosity. I like to ask questions, approaching books like a detective. My job is to investigate each book’s story, its importance. When I present my findings, I anticipate interrogation for every statement, as if a judge were leaning over my shoulder asking, “What’s your evidence?” If I call a book a first edition, what’s my evidence? If I say this book is rare, how do I know? If I call an author influential, where’s my source? I take pride in doing work that Sherlock Holmes would compliment. So how was I to catalog this book by an author I knew nothing about? I pulled down a stack of reference books from my shelves.
I quickly gathered that Evelina was Burney’s first and most famous novel, published to acclaim in 1778. Then, with my finger keeping my place in one reference book while I used my other hand to flip through another, I ran across something electric. If my job is to investigate a book’s importance, a detail like this becomes the star evidence in my case.
This is the moment I savor. I chase this feeling across auctions, in book fairs from London to San Francisco, through labyrinths of institutional special collections and private libraries, and on the pages in reference books.
The star evidence: the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Burney’s second novel, Cecilia (1782). Frances Burney, it turns out, had been one of Austen’s favorite authors. She wrote courtship novels very like Austen’s, focused on young heroines navigating the difficulties of finding love. Or rather, Austen wrote books very like hers: Burney was one of the most successful novelists of Austen’s lifetime. I’d had no idea. Me, a reader and re-reader of Austen’s work over decades. I had overlooked this important English author, one with deep significance to another I admired. In spite of my supposed professional curiosity, I realized I had missed something. And it stung.
In the Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the detective famously scolds Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” After Evelina crossed my desk (or rather, sat for months in that pile, stacked between Gulliver’s Travels and The Compleat Angler), I returned to Austen’s books and began to observe new traits in them. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of the gothic writer Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes so much controversy in Mansfeld Park is in fact a real one adapted by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. I was picking up on clues, sprinkled about in the works of Austen like bread crumbs, that pointed toward the women writers she admired.
Why hadn’t I noticed these authors before? I had researched the rise of the English novel for my job (and, who am I kidding, because I enjoyed it). The authors whom Austen referenced in her work had barely entered that discourse. Baffled, I headed to my bookshelf and pulled off a 2005 book on the English novel written for students “by one of the world’s leading literary theorists,” as the back panel assured me. I opened the first page. The period when Austen did most of her formative reading “was one of the most fertile, diverse, and adventurous periods of novel-writing in English history,” the author asserted—for one more paragraph, before moving straight to Austen and Walter Scott. The previous chapter had examined Laurence Sterne. I stared at the ceiling and did the math. Tristram Shandy’s last volume was published in 1767. Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, came in 1811. Forty-four years. Simply skipped.
Austen read William Shakespeare, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson, all authors I had read. She also read Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah Moore, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth, all authors I hadn’t. They were part of Austen’s bookshelf, but they had disappeared entirely from mine—and largely from that Leading Literary Theorist’s bookshelf as well. It was unsettling to realize I had read so many of the men on Austen’s bookshelf, but none of the women. Critical authorities like this one had provided the foundation for my understanding the past. But something was wrong. There was a crack in the foundation. I began to feel unsteady.
The feeling was all the more unsettling because this type of knowledge is central to what I do as a rare book dealer. “It is my business to know what other people do not know,” as the ever-quotable Sherlock Holmes says. For instance: the first edition in English of Grimm’s fairy tales contains a typo on the title page because the British printers forgot an umlaut on a German word; an adventure novel in Spanish called El Anacronópete (1887) describes a time machine eight years before the book most believe was the first to do so, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine; publisher Frederick Warne’s edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) isn’t the true first edition, but was preceded in 1901 by a run of a few hundred copies that Beatrix Potter printed privately as gifts for friends. Literary trivia is my joy and my currency.
Besides the ability to quote the Great Detective in nearly any situation, I can also tell you how many steps led to his flat in 221B; I can recite Sappho in Greek and Horace in Latin; I have participated in public readings of Ulysses; and I have seriously considered getting a tattoo of a Catullus verse. Yet I had completely missed some of Austen’s major predecessors. I’ve read swaths of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary—pages upon pages of eighteenth-century lexical entries—but I assumed these women writers from the same period weren’t worth my time.
The game was afoot (and no, I won’t stop quoting Holmes). When I investigated further, I learned that Austen had done all this reading during the first time in English history when more women published novels than men. Yet in my own reading, I had skipped them so entirely that it seemed almost intentional. And it was: the critics who shaped our modern idea of the novel in English so frequently dismissed women writers that the systematic excising has a name. It’s called the Great Forgetting. Only Austen survived that period, becoming “the first great women writer in English”—even though there is a passage in one of her own novels that explicitly celebrated the work of women writers who had come before her. Austen gave me a hint of my mistake in Northanger Abbey, as well as how I might correct it:
while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name.
In this passage, Austen had already recognized a mechanism of the Great Forgetting: “a thousand pens” talk of works like Milton’s Paradise Lost, while embarrassed to admit to reading novels. Austen felt no such shame. Novels display “some of the greatest powers of the mind,” she argued. And then she gave examples. Cecilia (1782) was Frances Burney’s second novel; Camilla (1796) was her third. Belinda (1801) was the second novel of another woman writer, Maria Edgeworth.
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To call Austen “the first great women writer in English,” really, is to call her the first British woman accepted in the Western canon. The canon is famous; it is useful. It offers a list of authors and titles that are recommended as classics by literary authorities like the author of that 2005 book on the English novel. You probably caught how loaded that sentence was; every part of it leads to more questions. Now you’re thinking like a rare book dealer. What is a classic? Who gets to be a literary authority? How do these authorities determine the list? Why do we need a list of recommended books at all?
The last question is easy enough to answer: Lists are useful because we cannot read every book. Because we cannot read every book, we must be selective. Because we must be selective, we must make judgments about which books to try before we read them. Because we must make judgments before reading, who better to trust for recommendations than professionals, like teachers and literary critics and other scholars, whose job it is to read and analyze many books? These professionals recommend books that are valuable to read far beyond their initial publication—what we call “classics.” But professionals have individual tastes, too, so a consensus of professionals is surely best. That consensus of classics, when approached as a list, is what we call the canon. The entire idea of a canon is practical.
Because I accepted all of that, I regularly purchased and read books like that 2005 survey of the English novel. I had also read Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), perhaps the single most influential study of the eighteenth-century English novel, the era when Frances Burney published and when Austen was doing most of her formative reading. Yet it was these very literary authorities who had led me astray: they either dismissed or outright ignored these authors Austen had held so dear. The idea of a canon may be practical, but I had been relying upon it too much.
I kept investigating, and soon learned that other scholars had been noticing these clues in Austen’s writings. Decades before the copy of Evelina became a jenga piece on my desk, feminist critics had been working to recover the stories of these women. Some would eventually become my guides. Yet even as scholars write new biographies of these women and their books are studied in university classes on the eighteenth-century English novel, their contributions are often left out of the venues that reach the widest range of people: popular books, introductory survey courses of English literature and high school curricula, film and television adaptations of literary classics, and more. Once I became aware of these gaps, I began to see them everywhere. As of this writing, the “genre and style” section of Jane Austen’s Wikipedia page notes Austen’s debt to Richardson and Johnson, while Burney isn’t mentioned at all. Most people don’t know. I didn’t know either.
I felt the weight of my mistake. I spent years wishing that Austen had authored more books. It didn’t even occur to me that there were women writers whom Austen had used as models—and whose books I could read, too.
Scholars have often used Austen as a gateway to study earlier writers, but my initial explorations into these books were discouraging. It felt as if every time I turned a corner, I ran into a dead end. First, I turned to one of the pioneering academic monographs on the subject, Frank W. Bradbrook’s Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (1966), which included an entire chapter about “The Feminist Tradition” in the English novel that influenced Austen. I thought that title boded well. I was wrong. It immediately introduced the tradition as “not particularly distinguished.”
He categorically dismissed the novelists whom Austen had praised in her own works, such as Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth: “Jane Austen turns inferior work by her predecessors and contemporaries to positive and constructive uses.” According to an authority like Bradbrook, this quest of mine had already been investigated and resolved: we call Jane Austen the first great woman writer in English…because she was.
But Austen herself had provided evidence contradicting that conclusion. Were these authorities suggesting that some of the favorite books of one of the greatest authors of all time were trash? Would an author of that caliber really have had such terrible taste?
I wanted to know who these women were, what they wrote, and why they were no longer part of the canon.
Part of the issue, I soon grasped, was that I was using the same methods to investigate these women as had originally caused the gap in my reading. I was relying upon grand narratives covering hundreds of years in a single book. My instinct was to trust the authorities who wrote these books because the canon had served me well in the past: I had enjoyed most of the “classics” that I had read (yes, even Ulysses). But the Great Forgetting lurked in these broad surveys. My investigation had turned into a labyrinth, and I was lost. I needed a different approach. It hadn’t been reading about important novels that led me to take interest in Frances Burney, after all. It was book collecting. I had come across that 1903 copy of Evelina entirely by chance. I needed to stop thinking like a twentieth-century student and start thinking like a twenty-first-century book collector.
As the cofounder of a rare book company, I work with collectors every day, helping them track down scarce editions, walking them through auction records, and introducing them to books they haven’t heard of but that are perfect for their shelves. In 2017 I also cofounded a book-collecting contest, the Honey & Wax Prize, for which we judge dozens of submissions annually and grant $1,000 to the winner. And I’m a collector myself, an school, when I would go without eating at school for the week so that I could spend my lunch money on used CDs on the weekend. Maybe don’t be like me.) Above $50, I would have to give it more thought. Above $100, I would save money in smaller amounts for a few months before making the buy. Above $500, and I would likely purchase it only if I was buying it for resale in my business. My collection was meant to be a source of joy, not a source of stress; a modest budget ensured it would remain so. Despite what newspaper headlines may tell you, you don’t have to be rich to collect rare books.
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It has been many years since that house call in Georgetown. I have spent that time building my book collection. Through this process, I did track down the evidence I had been seeking. It was not what I had assumed before: that these women weren’t remembered because they weren’t interesting enough, or their works weren’t good enough. I did not find a group of hacks whose devices and themes existed only to reach full perfection in Austen’s use of them. Instead, I found the turning points. I traced moments when these women were attacked, elided, demeaned, and displaced from the canon. In some cases, I also saw moments when they made their way back to the canon, championed by a particular critic or given new life with a popular reprint. Each book in my collection was a clue as to how all this happened, and why.
This is the story of how I collected books by, and books about, eight women writers whose works Jane Austen read, but who no longer have the widespread readership they once enjoyed. I read and studied their works, drawing on biography, literary criticism, literary history, and, of course, the skills of my trade in rare books. Over time, my book collection became a eulogy to these writers’ legacies—and an argument for their popular reassessment.
I have wondered over the years whether my project would have appealed to Austen. I’m confident she would have been horrified to hear today’s popular opinion of Frances Burney or Maria Edgeworth—when they are remembered at all. As repayment for what she had given me, I hoped I could offer Austen this in return: a collection that reunites the novels she read, and a book honoring her own favorite authors. I took my Sherlockian skills from the rare book trade and turned them to this investigation. I wanted to know who these women were, what they wrote, and why they were no longer part of the canon. I would read their books and I would collect copies that appealed to me for their historical interest. I would fill Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.
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Excerpted from Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney. Copyright © 2025 by Rebecca Romney. Reproduced by permission of Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
