Wild for Austen and Devoney Looser: Book Review and Writer Showcase

A combo installment, a four-star review along with the 12th in a series of summer interviews.

Sep 06, 2025

I first became aware of Professor Devoney Looser when she appeared on Karen Swallow Prior’s podcast Jane and Jesus in 2022. Since then I’ve enjoyed reading her online work, and when she announced a new book slated for release in September 2025, I jumped on the chance to read an advance copy and write a review.

Wild For Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane came out on September 2nd. I had hoped to have my review up before then but school and work got in the way, so here we are today!

(I received a free ebook from the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review.)

Persuasion’s outside-of-the-box wildness stems from a hero and heroine who become capable, rational creatures separately before they return to each other’s arms. —Looser, ch.10

Wild For Austen is a scholarly yet approachable work exploring the concept of wildness in Jane Austen’s life, influences, work, and legacy. What does this mean? Well, for decades Austen was regarded as a prim Victorian-esque spinster (despite dying before the Victorian era began) whose admitted expertise in writing began and ended in the drawing room. Though there were cynics who espoused this view (think of that viral, meme-ified Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, which asserted it was “just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses”) the concept of Austen as confined to romantic relationships and narrow social commentary (limited only to the lower echelons of the upper class) has persisted even among fans and some scholars. Looser’s work attempts to “put that myth to rest” and show exactly how subversive Austen was in her time—and ours.

I was slightly apprehensive at first that this book would try to superimpose modern attitudes on Austen posthumously, and dally too much with half-baked apocryphal fancies about Tom Lefroy and the mysterious seaside gentleman. Though I’m not one who considers Austen a “chick lit” writer (insert eye roll) or a Charlotte Bronte fan who agrees with Bronte’s rude assessment that “the passions were entirely unknown to her,” neither am I a conspiracy theorist. My appreciation of Looser’s past works, however, gave me confidence that her study of this topic wouldn’t be silly. And I was happily proven right.

“If I am a wild Beast I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.”
—Jane Austen in a letter to Cassandra, 24 May 1813

The book opens with Austen’s Juvenilia, sometimes called her Teenage Writings, and the witty wild wanderings on which they take the gumptious reader. (Seriously, the Juvenilia is unhinged. In a good ways From there Looser examines the heroines of all Jane’s major novels and the ways they upheld and subverted the societal expectations of the day. Don’t look for a staid interpretation of Elizabeth-Bennet-as-ahead-of-her-time and Fanny-Price-as-a-boring-prude, though. Looser’s examination of the women Austen wrote, and how and why she wrote them, is thoughtful and well-documented. She also covers the Austen family’s background and the scandals in which the extended family were embroiled (such as Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s shoplifting charge) and the abolition of slavery and how this connected to the Austens, as well as to Jane’s own work.

I confess I found some of this center section on family ties to be a bit slow-moving. I appreciated the wealth of research demonstrated here, but as a casual reader and not a scholar I found myself a bit bogged down with the level of detail. I wanted to get back to Austen herself, not her brothers or nephews.

The final section on Austen’s legacy was both illuminating and thought-provoking. I am skeptical of many Austen continuations and spin-offs, as I often feel the writers are simply capitalizing on her popularity in order to sell books, without actually loving and respecting the source material. But the cultural impact of “pop Austen” is fascinating and widespread, and I enjoyed reading about the Austenesque phenomena of the 20th (and 21st) century.

I also really appreciated Looser’s take on people who don’t care for Austen, or people who study and teach her works but take issue with the culture and class from which and about which she wrote (a valid critique and one worth considering, especially as we seek to unearth voices whom Looser notes may have been “drowned out” by Austen’s popularity.)

Emma’s heroine opines, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” It ought to be more than okay with us when others don’t love the same authors we do. …To my mind, criticizing Austen and her writings must be fair game, ought to be encouraged, and is important to her continued relevance. —Looser, ch. 24

In short, I would highly recommend this book for the devoted Janeite, though I would hesitate to push it on the less-avid fan; it’s heavily detailed and might not hold the attention of the more casual reader. But that might just convert a new Austen aficionado, might it not?

I also had the privilege of interviewing Devoney Looser for my Writer Showcase series!

Devoney Looser

writes

Counterpoise

here on Substack. She has written several other books including Sister Novelists and The Making of Jane Austen, she teachers at Arizona State University and she competes in roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen!

What do you write about?

I write about history’s smart, strong women, especially British women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and especially *especially* Jane Austen.

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

I started graduate school thinking that I might specialize in Jane Austen and the writers who came after her. But then I learned about the hundreds of fascinating women who were writing before and alongside her. I got pulled back to write about her predecessors as well as those she inspired.

How long have you been writing on Substack?

I moved over to Substack in 2022, having migrated there from another email newsletter program.

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I’m the author or editor of 12 books. I also have a series of 24 30-minute lectures on Jane Austen for The Great Courses and Audible, and I’ve published short pieces in such places as The Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, Salon, the TLS, and the Washington Post.

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

“Three of Jane Austen’s Six Brothers Engaged in Anti-Slavery Activism: New Research Offers More Clues about Her Own Views,” The Conversation (US), 14 August 2024, https://theconversation.com/3-of-jane-austens-6-brothers-engaged-in-antislavery-activism-new-research-offers-more-clues-about-her-own-views-230176

This is the third of three pieces I’ve published in recent years, reporting new discoveries about Jane Austen’s brothers and their public activism in the anti-slavery movement in the years after her death. Their activism offers us a potential new window into understanding the handful of references to slavery and abolition in Austen’s fiction.

“To Find Great Female Novelists, Stop Looking in Jane Austen’s Shadow,” The Washington Post, Book World Section, 27 November 2022, print and online. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/25/austen-bronte-great-female-novelists/

The title of this one says it all! This essay makes the case to readers and critics to look for greatness and genius in past women’s writings without measuring them against Jane Austen.

“The Forgotten Sisters who Pioneered the Historical Novel,” Smithsonian Magazine, 20 October 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-forgotten-sisters-who-pioneered-the-historical-novel-180980730/

Smithsonian Magazine published an edited excerpt of my dual biography of Jane and Anna Maria Porter. I hope it gives readers an idea of the flavor of the book as a whole and persuades them to care about the wrongly forgotten Porter sisters.

“Jane Austen Wasn’t Shy,” The New York Times (15 July 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/opinion/sunday/jane-austen-wasnt-shy.html

In this piece, I describe why I believe that we’ve overstated the case for Jane Austen’s modesty as an author and supposed hiding of her writing. I believe it’s based on slim and suspect evidence from her biographer nephew’s imagination.

Who is one other Substack writer you admire?

Janet Saidi

’s The Austen Connection!