READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION
Little-known facts about Enthusiasm and Jane Austen

*Jane Austen’s niece, Anna, wrote a novel called Enthusiasm, which she sent to her aunt. Jane had many encouraging things to say, including suggesting that Anna change the title to Which is the Heroine?

*The character of Charles Grandison Parr—or Parr for Short—was named after Sir Charles Grandison, the hero of Samuel Richardson’s 1753 novel of that name and one of Jane Austen’s favorite literary characters.

*Jane Austen published her novels anonymously, as was the custom of female writers at the time.

*Like many of Austen’s heroines, Jane herself turned down an offer of marriage that would have allowed her to live a more comfortable life and be less dependent on her family. In the end, she never married.

The Life and Legacy of Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) lived her entire life in the English countryside with her mother, father, sister, and two brothers. She never married nor ventured far from the confines of her family’s home, yet she wrote some of the most enduring novels of her time, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Emma.

When Jane Austen penned her first novel in 1789, little did she know that the stories she acted out in her drawing room with her sister and brothers would affect popular culture hundreds of years later. Dozens of movie adaptations of her novels have been made and continue to be popular, starring actors such as Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant. Her writing has inspired other books as well, such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Jane Austen Book Club, and Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating.

Polly Shulman has written about edible jellyfish, Egyptian tombs, infinity, blind dates, books, brains, centenarians, circuses, and cinematic versions of Jane Austen novels, for The New York Times, Discover,Newsday, Salon, Slate, Scientific American, Archaeology, and The Village Voice, among others. She edits news stories about fossils, meteors, the ocean, the weather, and the

She is an alumna of Hunter College High School, Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, and Yale University, where she majored in math. She has never dared to crash a dance, but in tenth grade she did write a proof for math class in the form of a sonnet. She grew up in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Andrew Nahem, and their parakeet, Olive. planets for Science magazine. She collects Victorian jewelry made of human hair, puts cayenne pepper in her chocolate cookies, and reads forgotten books with frontispieces.