Everybody's Jane

Juliette Wells is Assistant Professor of English at Manhattanville College, USA. She is editor (with Sandra Hagan) of The Brontes in the World of the Arts (Ashgate, 2008) and was features editor for the Penguin Classics enhanced e-book edition of Pride and Prejudice (2008).

• 1. Introduction: Approaching Austen in the Popular Imagination; 2. Alberta H. Burke, Austen Omnivore; 3. Reading Like an Amateur; 4. Getting Closer to Austen: Literary Tourism; 5. Envisioning Austen: Portraits, Fiction, Film; 6. Austen Hybrids: Sex, Horror/Paranormal, Faith; 7. Imagining the Austen Fan; References; Index.

Juliette Wells's Everybody's Jane engagingly fills a surprising gap in the bulging Jane Austen bookshelves, surveying how and why this writer of six anonymously published novels attracts both young and old, female and male, and academics and amateurs. Professor Wells leads the reader, including this one, to think about why one loves and respects the same "Jane" who has sparked an Austen cottage industry of key chains, mugs, and Regency dressing, but who shunned fame and publicity in her own life.