slauderdale’s Reviews > Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend > Status Update

Rebecca Romney is in love with Mrs. Piozzi and she has made me love her too.

“If you’ve spent any time reading about the world of 18th-century British literature, you know Piozzi already. Of all the women writers in this project, she was the only one with whom I was already quite familiar.“ Contrariwise, I don’t think I had ever encountered Piozzi’s name until I skimmed the table of contents for this book. [amused]

(I must acknowledge that her main point holds true: I DID read it as a college student.)

There’s this bit on 225–226 where she talks about buying a 1988 Oxford University Press edition of “A Simple Story”: “Editions like this indicated that [it] was still being read by the 1980s” but she makes a point that it is a university press rather than a modern Penguin paperback. I checked my Goodreads shelf to see if we had read the same edition. Funny thing: my copy was a 1997 Penguin paperback.

I enjoyed pages 172-177 where she constructs this episode in which the stars have aligned and she is finally going to read Hannah More - cue the chai and sensory descriptions of dirty antique paper - gets sidetracked by similarities with Mary Wollstonecraft, talks about Mary Wollstonecraft, then finds another readers’s ancient bookmark and uses that as her signal to stop reading. Fun chapter, though!

I definitely get the feeling that the author liked and likely read more of Lennox‘s work than Burney’s, and she does a great job of making me want to read her beyond just the one book as well.

“A favorite pastime of Johnsonians - yes, there are Johnsonians just as there are Janeites - “ e_e