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Calling All Jane Austen Fans: Devoney Looser ’89 to Hold a Book Reading and Signing at Augsburg

Devoney Looser

Update: This event has been moved to Hagfors 150.

If you’re a regular reader of the Augsburg Now magazine, you may recognize leading literary scholar, Austen expert, and roller derby devotee Devoney Looser ’89 from the featured article “No Plain Jane.” She is the author or editor of seven books on literature by women. Looser will be visiting Augsburg’s campus on February 5 at 7 p.m. to read from her most recent book “The Making of Jane Austen” in Hagfors 150. Books will be available for purchase at this event and Looser will stick around to visit with guests and sign their copies after the reading.

“The Making of Jane Austen” Press Release

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen’s early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know.

Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen’s reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet’s audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead.

Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen’s reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen’s evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen’s literary and cultural power. Whether you’re a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.