In "Jane Austen's Little Advice Book," Austen's own words are mixed with the fascinating facts of her biography and the times in which she lived, completing a lighthearted and loving look at this most enduring writer. Those who know Miss Austen's work only from screen adaptations should enjoy reading her actual, wonderful words; those who have loved her novels will enjoy rediscovering the brightest moments of her sparkling wit and vivid insight into human nature. In these charmless, graceless, loud, hurried times, we desperately long for the serene voice of good sense, good humor and good manners. Never have we needed Jane Austen more. "Jane Austen's Little Advice Book" is a celebration of the woman who is perhaps now the world's most famous female author, but who was almost completely unknown in her own lifetime. It is a fitting tribute to a woman whose only byline was: "By a Lady."

Raff traces Austen's increasingly libidinal narrative presence, while simultaneously offering analysis of her biography that connects prose and life.

“When one has read the six great Austen novels…and then reread and then reread the six again, one’s only recourse is the company of others equally bereft. Cindy Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer fills the gap with a nourishing Austen-soaked setting, a wonderfully surprising plot, and Lily, a delightfully peculiar heroine.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club Author Cindy Jones has a gift for the millions of readers everywhere who have been enchanted by Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and the other wondrous works of the inimitable Austen—not to mention fans of more contemporary delights such as The Jane Austen Book Club. Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer is a delightful, funny, poignant novel in which a contemporary woman—an obsessed Austenphile—learns much about life, love, and herself during one magical summer in England spent re-enacting Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

In November 1814, Jane Austen's niece Fanny Knight wrote Austen a letter secretly requesting advice. Fanny wanted urgently to know whether she should continue encouraging her most ardent suitor, what the future would hold were she to marry him, and whether she, Fanny, was in love with him. Fanny evidently wished to turn over her love life to Austen's creative direction, and Austen's letters of response cooperate with this desire. Today, many readers address to Austen's novels their deepest uncertainties about their love lives. Consulting Austen-themed divination toys for news about the future or applying to their own circumstances the generalizations they have gleaned from Austen's narrator, characters, or plots, they look to Austen not for anonymous instruction but for the custom-tailored guidance-and magical intervention-of an advisor who knows them well. This book argues that Austen, inspired by her niece to embrace the most scandalous possibilities of the novel genre, sought in her three last-published novels to match her readers with real-world lovers. The fictions that Austen wrote or revised after beginning the advisory correspondence address themselves to Fanny Knight. They imagine granting Fanny a happy love life through the thaumaturgic power of literary language even as they retract Austen's epistolary advice and rewrite its results. But they also pass along the role of Fanny Knight to Austen's readers, who get a chance to be shaped by Austen's creative effort, to benefit from Austen's matchmaking prowess, and to develop nothing less than a complex love relation with Austen herself.

A delightful and informative guide to writing like Jane Austen, written by the five-times-great niece of Austen herself Jane Austen is one of the most beloved writers in the English literary canon. Her novels changed the landscape of fiction forever, and her writing remains as fresh, entertaining and witty as the day her books were first published. Bursting with useful exercises, beautiful illustrations and enlightening quotations from the classic author's novels and letters – and written by none other than Austen's five-times-great-niece – this book will teach you her methods, tips and tricks, from techniques of plotting and characterisation through to dialogue and suspense. Whether you're a creative writing enthusiast looking to publish your first novel, a teacher searching for further inspiration for students, or fan seeking insight into Austen's daily rituals, this is an essential companion, guaranteed to satisfy, inform and delight. 'Winning and beguiling ... Smith shares Jane Austen's clarity and gentle irony' Independent