Review: 'Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels' by Rachel Cohen
Pub. Date: 21/07/2020
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels.
Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.
With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.
Jane Austen was one of the first big loves of my life. I fell in love with Pride & Prejudice first, as one does, and then the other five novels followed rapidly. In many ways reading Jane Austen set me on the path I am today, reading for meaning across centuries and finding answers there for issues today. Janw Austen wrote six novels, two of which were published posthumously, and left behind two unfinished works. These were Sense & Sensibility (1811), Pride & Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both 1817), and Sanditon and The Watsons respectively. She also left behind writings from her youth and an epistolary novel, Lady Susan. Out of these, Pride & Prejudice was my most enduring love, but it was Persuasion which recently became the novel that began to speak to me most strongly. It is a novel of intense sadness, of mourning for people and opportunities and versions of oneself long gone. It is a mature book, especially when compared to the vibrant P&P, but one which gains in depth on each reread. That it spoke to Cohen in the midst of big life changes is no wonder, but I did find myself amazed at all the ideas and themes she pulled out of it.
In Austen Years, Rachel Cohen finds herself guided by Persuasion as she begins to process some major changes in her life. Over the years in which she is pregnant with her first child, loses her father, becomes pregnant with the second child, and moves, she somehow finds herself reading only Jane Austen. She doesn't know why and for a while she pushes it away, trying to finish her other writing. Eventually, however, she has to face it and ask why it is that Austen seems to be the only thing her brain will focus on. Throughout Austen Years, Cohen shows how her own changing experiences change how she reads Austen, how the increasing research into Austen broadens the way she thinks about the art of writing itself, how the forms of self-recognition and grief in Austen's work help her in working through her own. I found her thoughts on Mansfield Park, its historical background in abolitionism, and its focus on theatre and dislocation very intriguing. The love she gives Persuasion also hit my Anne Elliot-loving heart in the right way. I am intrigued by the fact that Northanger Abbey never quite hit her, and its absence is the only thing I missed in the book. I really enjoyed reading Austen through her eyes and have decided to embark upon a reread of her works myself.
I was quite solidly convinced that memoirs were not my thing. The lives of other people are interesting, yes, but I think I'd rather read fiction. And yet, and yet, I was somehow gripped by Rachel Cohen's writing from the introductory chapter onwards. Part of it definitely has to do with my own love for Jane Austen, which made me intrigued about Cohen's opinions about her. But Cohen also has a way of writing about her own experiences in a way that is both deeply personal and open enough that you can try and connect to them yourself. As such, Austen Years doesn't have a very strong structure, it is not as if one chapter is dedicated to only one Austen book or only one part of Cohen's life. The writing flows through Cohen's different life stages, reaching back to her childhood and then jumping into the first experience of parenthood. In discussing the art of writing itself, in writing about writing and in writing about reading, she also has me intrigued to read more memoir writing that leans literary, like Austen Years. Thankfully, Cohen does provide a list of Notes, so that'll be where I start.
I give this book...
5 Universes!
I had a beautiful time with Austen Years and have gained a new appreciation for memoirs as a form of writing. Any lover of Jane Austen will enjoy this book, but those with an interest in the art of writing and (re-)reading will as well.
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