Claudia L. Johnson & Clara Tuite 
30 Great Myths about Jane Austen [PDF ebook] 

Abbreviations and Note on the Text vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction xi
Myth 1 Jane Austen had no interest in fame 1
Myth 2 There is no sex in Jane Austen’s novels 7
Myth 3 Jane Austen wrote on little bits of ivory 14
Myth 4 Jane Austen’s juvenilia are scraps which she outgrew 19
Myth 5 Jane Austen’s novels are naturalistic 27
Myth 6 Jane Austen was unconscious of her art 34
Myth 7 Northanger Abbey is a spoof on Gothic fiction 43
Myth 8 The Bath Jane Austen knew and loathed 49
Myth 9 Jane Austen’s writing is easy to understand 56
Myth 10 Sense and Sensibility is a satire on sensibility 61
Myth 11 Jane Austen was the best-selling novelist of her time 66
Myth 12 Regency Austen 72
Myth 13 Only women read Jane Austen 80
Myth 14 As Pride and Prejudice shows, all Austen’s novels are love stories 85
Myth 15 Jane Austen never mentions the war 93
Myth 16 Something happened to Jane Austen when she wrote Mansfield Park 101
Myth 17 Jane Austen disapproved of the theater 107
Myth 18 Jane Austen was a Christian moralist 114
Myth 19 In Emma, Jane Austen created a heroine no one but an author would love 120
Myth 20 Jane Austen and the amorous effects of brass 128
Myth 21 Persuasion is an autumnal novel 134
Myth 22 Jane Austen was a feminist/Jane Austen was not a feminist 141
Myth 23 Jane Austen’s letters are mean and trivial 147
Myth 24 Jane Austen was anonymous 155
Myth 25 Jane Austen’s novels depict the traditional world of the aristocracy 160
Myth 26 Jane Austen was a comic novelist 168
Myth 27 Jane Austen’s novels are about good manners 174
Myth 28 Jane Austen’s muslins 179
Myth 29 Jane Austen writes escape fiction 187
Myth 30 Jane Austen was a star-crossed lover 193
Further Reading 200
Index 203

Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English at Princeton University. She specializes in Eighteenth-Century and Nineteenth-Century British literature, and gender studies. Renowned for her works on Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, Johnson’s books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel; Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s; and Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, which won the Christian Gauss Award.
Clara Tuite is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, a Co-Director of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her books include Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon and Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, which was awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Association of Byron Societies.