Reading Jane Austen

Jenny Davidson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Professor Davidson's previously published works include Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004), Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (2009), and Reading Style: A Life in Sentences (2014). She is the author of four novels, Heredity (2003), The Explosionist (2008), Invisible Things (2010), and The Magic Circle (2013).

• 1. Letters; 2. Conversation; 3. Revision; 4. Manners; 5. Morals; 6. Voice; 7. Female economies.

'Davidson's close readings are delightfully fresh, designed to provide formal accounts of how Austen's fiction functions for the specialist and the common reader alike.' Gillian Dow, The Times Literary Supplement