LIT LISTS: Six titles that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Six titles that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the

History Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Romney is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Romeny's new books is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend .

At Lit Hub she tagged six books that "owe a debt to Austen’s work" by authors who "teased out threads from Austen in order to make something peculiarly their own." One title on the list:

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

I could have created a list entirely of contemporary romance authors and it would have been a worthy homage to Austen’s influence, but the breadth of her reach is itself unusual. This murder mystery is an Austen pastiche, using the characters and setting of Austen’s novels, but with an entirely original story. It picks up a few years after Pride and Prejudice, when George Wickham is accused of murder.

James named Austen among the authors of whom she can “detect the influence […] in my own work.” James appreciated Austen’s lurking cynicism, which proved excellent inspiration for a murder mystery in James’s own style. James disliked Austen’s overly saccharine reputation, which she thought unmerited. As James recorded in her diary: “‘Her sweetness of temper never failed,’ wrote her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. On the contrary, it failed frequently, and if it hadn’t we would not have had six great novels.”