Jane Austen′s Names – Riddles, Persons, Places

New
Paperback
2016
$25.99

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a big cheese the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked. In Jane Austen's Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places real and imaginary in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency. Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen's Names will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.

Synopsis

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a big cheese the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked. In Jane Austen's Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places real and imaginary in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency. Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen's Names will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.

$25.99

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 440
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 26 Oct 2016
ISBN 10: 022641910X
ISBN 13: 9780226419107

Media Reviews

Doody brings the insights of a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing about Austen to this book. I admire how Jane Austen's Names brings to view the riddling and punning play that Austen indulged in her naming practices. Doody reveals an author who positively relishes the comic resonances of the names she encountered in the social world around her. --Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History
Doody makes a convincing argument that Jane Austen (1775-1817) imbued most, if not all, of her character and place names with historical, geographical, or social significance, and provides the historical and cultural context necessary to understand the import of each of these careful naming choices. . . . A delightful, edifying read for both scholars and lay Austen fans.
--Library Journal
A magical mystery tour of virtually every location, and every family and individual, mentioned not only in the novels, but also in the Juvenilia and even the letters and diaries. . . . Doody writes with clarity and elegance, and arranges her material to lead the reader ever onwards into a whole world of language and meaning. . . . A comprehensive study, but never a dull one, this book is as entertaining as it is revealing, and will doubtless uncover fresh layers of meaning for even the best-read Austen fan.
--Jane Austen's Regency World
No one, with the possible exception of Jane Austen herself, knows the fiction of Jane Austen and her time more intimately than Margaret Doody, and the depth and breadth of this knowledge is richly deployed here. . . . An erudite, provocative, and original book.
--Review 19
To read Jane Austen's Names is to appreciate Austen's writings anew in the company of a peerlessly learned, delightfully opinionated scholar--an opportunity not to be missed.
--JASNA News
Doody's book is a marvellous thing. . . . The bravura set-piece literary criticisms are fresh, and valuable in themselves (Elinor Dashwood isn't really as sensible as all that; obscured window panes are important in Persuasion), and so are the frequent, hitherto unmade links to the other novels by women that Jane Austen was reading. --Times Literary Supplement
Jane Austen's Names is a treasure chest.
--First Things

Author Bio

Margaret Doody is the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of many books, including the Aristotle Detective series, the first three of which are available from the University of Chicago Press.