Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

by Rebecca Romney

When I finally practiced Sherlock Holmes’s philosophy—to observe, not just to see—I understood what Austen had been telling us this whole time: Austen never viewed herself as the lone great woman writer of her era. And she wasn’t.

But More was a controversial figure, both in her lifetime and after. During an 1802 dispute at one of her Sunday schools, one man wrote a two-hundred-plus-page hit piece on More under the pen name “the Reverend Sir Archibald MacSarcasm.”

I see this particular naming convention is not a new thing 😂

It is natural that novels about women in this era would focus on the most critical point in a woman’s life, one of the few moments where she exercised power: the question of marriage. Those who denigrate courtship novels rarely consider these plots with the law of coverture in mind. When a man has that much control over your life and your children’s lives, the kind of man you marry can literally be a question of life or death.

Piozzi has remained a polarizing figure for over two centuries. Over the years, her rebellions have been cited repeatedly as proof that Piozzi was graceless, vain, and self-centered. But even a short description of a few of them is enough to inspire admiration to a modern reader (or perhaps I’m just telling on myself ). There is some justification for either interpretation, as this oft-quoted 1781 passage from her journal captures: “Miss Owen & Miss Burney asked me if I had never been in Love; with myself, said I, & most passionately. when any Man likes me I never am surprized, for I think how should he help it? when any Man does not like me, I think him a Blockhead, & there’s an End of the matter.” (And yes: “Miss Burney” is our Burney.) No matter your reaction to such a passage, one point is clear: Hester Piozzi was never boring.