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

by Rebecca Romney

Books give us a window into the minds of others, but they also help us know our own.

This is one of the most powerful factors in many authors’ ascent into the canon: when an entire generation is required to read the same texts, those texts become part of their shared vocabulary.

In his Sermons, Fordyce stated that the only kind of woman who would read any of the racier novels available at the time “must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will.”