Austen Years by Rachel Cohen

Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels
By Rachel Cohen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

When Rachel Cohen was young, she thought the novels of Jane Austen were frothy coming-of-age stories. “I thought of Austen as a writer for the young woman I had been,” she writes in Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels. As she matured, she turned back to Austen and found something entirely different: “Austen’s subject…is not women embroidering on sofas but life with other people.” At a period in her life when Cohen was grappling with significant changes in her own “life with other people,” she turned again and again to the novels of Jane Austen as a kind of reflective glass to help her make sense of the commitment to domestic partnership, the experience of motherhood, her shifting relationship with her sister, her connection to her father, and the grief she felt after his death. Over these years, she dipped into Austen’s novels constantly, reading them “like a map.”

Although Cohen might have been seeking distraction when she first picked up an Austen novel as an adult, she quickly understood that the comfort Austen provided was not distraction but deep engagement with issues of grief and emotional commitment. Cohen’s personal experiences and preoccupations—her “pronounced personal point of view”—allowed her to see themes in Austen which readers have often assumed Austen elided. “Criticism and memoir have always been near neighbors,” the author points out. Austen Years straddles the property line between the two neighbors brilliantly.

Austen Years pairs each of the novels Cohen discusses with one of the major themes that runs through the author’s life. The chapters discussing Sense and Sensibility are especially powerful. As she reads, Cohen realizes that Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are deeply grieving the death of their beloved Mr. Dashwood, just as she and her sister have been mourning the death of their father. As Cohen reads and rereads Austen’s novel--a novel she had earlier interpreted primarily as a romantic comedy “that didn’t quite work”—she begins to understand that the sisters’ acute grief is essential to the novel. Austen’s characters lose their father and their home, and then have those losses underlined when they are abandoned by men they thought were in love with them. “All the main characters have the tendency to plunge suddenly and surprisingly low,” writes Cohen. The intensity of their emotions “speak to the absence that dizzies them, unsettling the very ground beneath their feet.” The author argues that although “the book is not usually described as a novel about grief,” the sisters’ mourning is a shadow hovering throughout the novel. Just as the Dashwood sisters judge each other’s ways of grieving, Cohen recognizes that she and her own sister mourn their father in different ways. “Both are endangered by the division,” she writes.

Cohen points out that Austen’s novels often end not with the marriage of two characters but with a private moment where the two people take a walk together. Emma takes a turn around the garden with Mr. Knightly, while Elizabeth strolls with Darcy. At the end of Sense and Sensibility, the resolution happens instead when Elinor and Marianne come together for a walk and set off on their own path of resolution. Threaded through Austen Years is a series of similar reconciling walks, many around Fresh Pond, a spot of calm near Cohen’s home to which the author returns regularly, circling around it just as she cycles through Austen’s books throughout these years.

Cohen is not the only person to write about the personal experience of reading Jane Austen. She is attentive to the work of other literary discussions of Austen’s novels, including essays by authors from Virginia Woolf to Azar Nafisi to Ta-Nehisi Coates. She finds their work exciting and inspiring: “After I had learned more of what Austen had meant and meant to others,” she writes, “I saw more of who I had been, reading her pages.”

Austen Years will appeal to lovers of Jane Austen, to those interested in memoirs about grief and mourning, and to all who recognize the companionship of literature. Readers who have especially enjoyed memoirs in the developing subgenre of personal literary criticism (such as Mark Doty’s What Is the Grass, Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, and Katherine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived) will be entranced by this graceful and deeply introspective book.

—Hannah Joyner is an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.