The first book to investigate Jane Austen's popular significance today, Everybody's Jane considers why Austen matters to amateur readers, how they make use of her novels, what they gain from visiting places associated with her, and why they create works of fiction and nonfiction inspired by her novels and life.The voices of everyday readers emerge from both published and unpublished sources, including interviews conducted with literary tourists and archival research into the founding of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the exceptional Austen collection of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke of Baltimore.Additional topics include new Austen portraits; portrayals of Austen, and of Austen fans, in film and fiction; and hybrid works that infuse Austen's writings with horror, erotica, or explicit Christianity.Everybody's Jane will appeal to all those who care about Austen and will change how we think about the importance of literature and reading today.

Jane knew she was a war baby because Mummy Grace said all war babies had to drink the treacly black malt from The Clinic every morning. Then Mummy Grace told Jane she wasn't her mummy. Her mummy was a lady who lived in Le Tookay. Or was it Cassablanka? An exceptional memoir, written by one of our most outstanding actresses, Everybody's Daughter, Nobody's Child is a vivid and moving chronicle of childhood.

'Stunning . . . it almost feels transgressive' Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail 'One of the most startling novels I've read this year' Frances Wilson, TLS 'This book is brilliant - brave, truthful and intelligent' Wendy Cope 'Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences' Claire Kilroy, Guardian 'I will break him; he will break me, and when we are broken, we will be even, and then we can be put back together again' Jane has been accustomed to clever, undemonstrative men. So when, as a young woman, she meets Ardu, she is instantly bewitched by his intellect and detachment. What starts as a crush turns into something far darker, an all-consuming obsession, from which, years later, she is still reeling. Crazy is a work of autofiction, a startling story of obsessive love, addiction, motherhood and work. It is a reckoning with fiction and with truth: how these things play out on the body; what it takes for a woman to write out her own life.

Banished to her room for hitting her brother, Patty Jane plots the rest of her life—which might just involve never leaving her room again. ‘The deadpan humor of the authors is perfectly suited to Roz Chast’s wonderfully waggish illustrations. Not only do her pictures faithfully mirror the antics of the story, they also expand on the jokes, adding hilarious details and prankish asides.’ —NYT. ‘[A] standout.…Chast gets the tone just right: childlike but heartfelt.’—SLJ. Children's Choices for 1994 (IRA/CBC)