Austen Years
(Book on CD)

Compact disc.

07/21/2020

Read by Rachel Cohen, Justine Eyre.

When Rachel Cohen's father died and before she gave birth to her first child, she turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. Simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became Cohen's 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 the novels. It is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of Cohen's relationship to Austen, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen's novels, the scope of it widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father's last letter, a moment paired with the grief and social bonds of Sense and Sensibility and Pride.