About this item
An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen's novels.Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer's relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself.
About the Author
I started publishing essays after I spent a year driving 19,000 miles around the country, trying to understand what it is to be an American writer, and mostly reading the crates of books I had in my trunk. Since then my essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, The Believer, McSweeney's, and Best American Essays. I write about the lives of artists and writers, their friendships, discoveries, and reversals. My two books, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (PEN/Jerard Fund Award, finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize, notable book of the year by the LA Times and Maureen Corrigan on NPR) and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (October, 2013) have both been praised for the way they handle both the inner lives of artists and the external circumstances that have so much to do with how it feels to live a creative life. I'm a member of the regular faculty of the creative nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College, and I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I keep a notebook on looking at paintings at http://rachelecohen.com/.
