An FSG Live event, in partnership with Seminary Co-op Bookstore

Buy link: https://www.semcoop.com/austen-years-memoir-five-novels

Join Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels author Rachel Cohen in discussion with Maya Jasanoff and Vijay Seshadri.

"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."

In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her 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 Austen’s novels.

Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, 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 Austen Years 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 of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.

With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.

Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize, and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, which was longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.

Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005) and Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. Her most recent book is The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global War.

Vijay Seshadri is the author of the poetry books “Wild Kingdom,” “The Long Meadow,” “The Disappearances,” (Harper-Collins India), “3 Sections,” and “That Was Now, This Is Then” (forthcoming Fall, 2020), as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been widely published and anthologized and recognized with a number of honors. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

“[A] thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another, in which Cohen entrusts her own thoughts and feelings to a great writer’s craft . . . full of neat observations and provocative comparisons . . . Austen becomes Cohen’s enduring companion through the joys and troubles of love and motherhood and the grief of a major loss. The novels reveal ways in which seemingly irreconcilable feelings are inextricably bound together.”

―Sophie Gee, The New York Times Book Review

"An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again."

―Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

―Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

“[A] tender, rigorous criticism/memoir hybrid . . . [Austen Years] intimately matches Jane’s literary interrogations―especially those about how women process the infinite varieties of grief―with tender personal sketches. The premise could turn hokey, but Cohen’s readings are invigorating.”

―Vulture (29 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer)

“A luminous gift to Janeites everywhere.”

―Christian Science Monitor (Best Books of July)

“A wondrous mix of memoir and biography . . . [Austen Years] is a book not to be hurried through but consumed in small portions and pondered over as it sparks introspection. [Cohen's] deep knowledge of and respect for Austen’s novels will equally impress Austenites and readers less versed in her works."

“[A]n absorbing pleasure that will stimulate and augment the reading of Austen for fans old and new.”

“In the achingly precise Austen Years, the refusal to be finished reading the texts that mean most to us converges with the desire to bring a halt to time’s passage in the mourning of the loss of a parent, or the daily transformations of being one. The delicacy and patience of Rachel Cohen’s approach match that of her subject.”

―Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

"I read Austen Years with real pleasure and fascination over several evenings ― it’s a truly exceptional piece of work, a tender and moving meditation on fiction and family memory, on Austen and on Cohen’s beloved father, all so surprisingly combined and acutely observed. It’s completely captivating."

―Richard Holmes, author of This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

"In her biographies, Rachel Cohen displays one of the most widely ranging minds I've ever encountered in a book. Stunningly, in Austen Years, she reveals that during a lengthy period of personal transitions, she turned exclusively to a single author, Jane Austen, immersing herself intensely. Her memoir is an astonishingly fresh reading of Austen's novels, a deeply felt reexamination of their great themes (love, inheritance, how to be with others in the world), and a lyrical ode to the pleasures and rewards of paying close attention. It will sit next to Pride and Prejudice on my shelf."

Rachel Cohen in Conversation with Maya Jasanoff and Vijay Seshadri