Author: Looser, Devoney

c 1800 to c 1900

Published on 23 September 2025 by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 336 pages, 16 colour illustrations, 13 black & white illustrations
234 x 156 |

Publishing for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, this unmissable book offers an incisive and entertaining look at her life, writing, and legacy.

You may have thought Jane Austen was a quiet spinster, but Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest. Tracing the author’s life and legacy across 250 years, she reveals an Austen far wilder than the one we know.

Looser takes a deep dive into Austen’s work, offering fresh insights into her six completed novels, as well as her juvenilia, unfinished fiction, essays, and poetry. She also reveals new information about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. Examining the author’s legacy, she turns up extraordinary stories about ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in court, and the eclectic members of the Austen family, whose own outrageous lives are wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth and humour, and filled with remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to one of the world’s most beloved novelists. — .