Jones Library's Jane Austen's Regency World Book Club Reading List

"These three short works from across Jane Austen's career show her writing in a variety of styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of classes and setting. The early epistolary novel Lady Susan depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with several men. The Watsons is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine finds her marriage opportunities restricted by poverty and pride. Written in the last months of Austen's life, the tantalizing...

"She will do as I have bidden her." Catherine Sloper is heiress to a fortune and the social eminence associated with Washington Square. She attracts the attention of a good-looking but penniless young man, Morris Townsend. His suit is encouraged by Catherine's romantically-minded aunt, Mrs. Penniman, but her father, a clever physician, is convinced that his motives are merely mercenary. He will not consent to the marriage, regardless of the cost to...

"Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son are the most celebrated characters in all of Jewish fiction. Tevye is the lovable, Bible-quoting father of seven daughters, a modern Job whose wisdom, humor, and resilience inspired the lead character in Fiddler on the Roof. Motl is the spirited and mischievous nine-year-old boy who accompanies his family on a journey from their Russian shtetl to New York, and whose comical, poignant, and clear-eyed observations...

15-year-old Cher, the matchmaking Beverly Hills High schooler, has shopping and boys on her mind. She leads a hectic lifestyle but keeps it all together until she starts to fall in love and finds she's 'clueless'. A loose adaptation of Emma, Jane Austen's 19th-century comedy of manners.

Beautiful Chiara is the last of the Ridolfi, a Florentine family of long lineage and eccentric habits. She is smitten with Salvatore, a brilliant but penniless doctor, a rational man who wants nothing to do with romance. This is the story of how these two - with the best intentions, the kindest of instincts, and the most meddlesome of friends - make each other wonderfully miserable.

"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...

After her father's involvement in a public scandal, Daisy must navigate the sale of the family home, her sister's inconvenient crush, and her best friend writing an expose, in a modern retelling of Jane Austen's classic Sense and Sensibility. When it is revealed that her esteemed father had been involved in a public scandal before his untimely death, Daisy Richardson's family must sell the family home in Georgetown they can no longer afford-- but...

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

"In an alternative version of Victorian London, a seventeen-year-old Dodger, a cunning and cheeky street urchin, unexpectedly rises in life when he saves a mysterious girl, meets Charles Dickens, and unintentionally puts a stop to the murders of Sweeney Todd"-- Provided by publisher