Austen Chat: Episode 22

April 3, 2025

The Women Writers Who Inspired Austen: A Visit with Rebecca Romney

"I have made up my mind to like no novels really but Miss Edgeworth's, yours, and my own."—Jane Austen to her niece, Anna Lefroy, 1814

Jane Austen’s novels and letters are strewn with references to the female authors she admired—writers like Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Lennox. But these novelists, despite their wide popularity in their own time, have largely disappeared from our bookshelves. In this episode, rare book dealer Rebecca Romney shares some of their stories, examines their influence on Austen, and may even inspire you to add some of Austen’s favorites to your own to-be-read list. 

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a Washington, DC-area rare book firm. Over the course of her career, she has sold Shakespeare folios, first editions of Newton's Principia Mathematica and Darwin's Origin of Species, and individual leaves from the Gutenberg Bible. The author of several books, her latest is Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend. She is also the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Rebecca Romney for being a guest on Austen Chat!

• Learn more about Rebecca and her work on her website at https://www.rebeccaromney.com. You can also browse her rare book shop, Type Punch Matrix, at https://www.typepunchmatrix.com. 
• Follow Rebecca on Instagram @rebecca.romney and Facebook
• Follow Type Punch Matrix on Instagram @TypePunchMatrix and Facebook

Listen to Austen Chat here, on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms), or on our YouTube Channel.

Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published April 3, 2025. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved.  Images: Wikimedia Commons.  Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. Listeners, we're all bibliophiles here, so I'm sure you'll be as delighted as I am by my guest today. Rebecca Romney is a rare books dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a Washington, DC-area rare book firm. Over the course of her career, Rebecca has sold Shakespeare folios, first editions of Newton's Principia Mathematica and Darwin's Origin of Species, and individual leaves from the Gutenberg Bible. Please give me a moment while I breathe deeply into a paper bag to keep from passing out. The author of several books, her latest is Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend. Welcome to the show, Rebecca.

Rebecca Romney: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Breckyn: Okay, so we often play an Austen version of Would You Rather? at the beginning of each episode, but I want to ask you a slightly different icebreaker question inspired by your new book. So, of the eight female authors you discuss in your book, besides Jane Austen, which of them would you most like to have dinner with and why?

Rebecca: I have two answers to this for totally different reasons. The most entertaining person to have dinner with would have been Hester Lynch Piozzi. She was famous for her entertainment. She was a legendary wit, and she would host dinners when she was—she was very close friends with Samuel Johnson. She was known as Mrs. Thrale during the period of their friendship, during her first marriage. And so, yes, if you know anything about 18^th-century British letters, and you've heard about Johnson, you almost certainly know Piozzi as Mrs. Thrale. She hosted these elaborate dinners that people like Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds were regular visitors to, and they loved going to her house because Mr. Thrale, her husband, kept a great table, but she was the one who essentially provided the entertainment and kept everyone going. And she could match wits with Samuel Johnson. That's one of the reasons Johnson loved her so much. And so, I think just in terms of having a memorable, great dinner, it would be Piozzi.

But I also would just love to have dinner with Ann Radcliffe because we know so little about her. She's the one who, tantalizingly, probably had her reputation effaced, in part, because she retired really early from public life, and there wasn't a lot of biographical information about her. So, when people later on tried to write biographies about her, like Christina Rossetti, there wasn't enough biographical information to be had to write those biographies. And since James Edward Austen-Leigh's memoir of his aunt, Jane Austen, was a huge turning point in reviving Austen and creating the first major wave of fandom, etc., you kind of feel like, "Well, if Ann Radcliffe had one of those, it might have made a difference." So, I just would love to know more about Ann Radcliffe as a person.

Breckyn: To fill in those gaps. So, say the long name for me again. Piazzoli? What was her last name?

Rebecca: Yes, her last name from her second marriage is Piozzi. She married an Italian musician, and that was a big problem for all her friends. They didn't like that. But she was best known as Mrs. Thrale from her first marriage. So, Hester Lynch. And then sometimes people will say, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi.

Breckyn: And she had her own salon, right? Did she think of it as that? I always think that I would like to live in the time of those salons, where you just have all these amazing artists and writers, and they're all coming together, and . . .

Rebecca: Yes, it was considered something of a friendly competition with the Blue Stocking hostesses, like Elizabeth Montagu.

Breckyn: Well, that sounds like it would have been delightful. Okay, Rebecca, let's dive in. So, Jane Austen's Bookshelf is about the women writers who influenced Jane Austen, but who most people don't really read anymore today. So, what inspired you to research these women and bring them to the forefront?

Rebecca: I started doing this because I was one of those people who hadn't read any of them. And I know, particularly in JASNA circles, in Janeite circles, there are people who have done exactly what I'm doing in this book, which is saying, "Oh, Jane Austen liked Frances Burney, maybe I should give Burney a try." What happened to me that started this as an official project were two things. The first was that I was reading about all the people that Austen liked, all of the—you know, there's discussions of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, Shakespeare, all those types of authors. And then there's discussion of Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Lennox, and Charlotte Smith. And I realized I had read every single one of the men that were ever discussed when it comes to Austen reading, and I had not read any of the women at all, and most of them I hadn't even heard of. And the starkness of that in my own casual reading was shocking to me. I was, like, "I've just been unintentionally sexist this whole time." I felt like I need to do a course correction on my own reading.

So, that was turning point number one. It's just realizing how stark it was. I thought, "I need to intervene in my own casual reading and fix the fact that I just have been ignoring this huge swath of authors." But secondarily, I had this moment where I was like, "Well, Austen's the best, and there's a reason we read Austen, but we don't read Burney anymore, right?" So I thought, "I don't know that these are actually going to be any good, but I'm curious, and I'm sure I'll learn more about Austen in doing so." And then I actually read some of the books. I read Evelina, and Cecilia, and Camilla by Frances Burney. I read The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. I read Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, etc., etc., and they were good. I really, really enjoyed them. And so, the question became for me not, "Are these any good?" but "Why don't we read them anymore if they are, in fact, good?" And that's why I turned it into a book collecting project, because I use book collecting as a way to analyze the rise and fall, and in some cases, rise again of their reputations over time, because you see that through the imprints—whether they are pitched as classics, how many reprints they get in a generation—all of those are indicators that you can follow by collecting these books.

Breckyn: That's really interesting. I remember, as I was getting ready for this interview, I had one class for my English major in college, where we read authors who, when they first came out, were not considered for children, but then they sort of went through this juvenilization in the publishing industry.

Rebecca: Like Jules Verne.

Breckyn: Yeah, Jules Verne, and it was Washington Irving, specifically. I remember reading him and being like, "This guy is great. Why doesn't anybody read Washington Irving anymore? Has anyone heard of him?" And, of course, we know Rip Van Winkle, we know Sleepy Hollow, we know the children's illustrated super-abridged or retelling versions of them, but most people don't read the originals anymore. And so that is really fascinating—how the publishing industry has a much bigger influence on the afterlives of authors than most readers realize, I think.

Rebecca: Absolutely. Same thing with Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. And a big part of the project was I read a lot of critics; I read a lot of scholarship—I am greatly indebted to modern feminist recovery scholarship in working on this project. And also, a huge part of it was going back and just reading the books myself, and making my own decisions about whether or not I liked it, rather than saying, "Oh, this critic says this one's not worth reading." Instead of doing it that way and just saying, "Oh, listen to the authorities"—the authorities were very helpful to me in a number of ways, but I also wanted to choose for myself and impose my own taste. The book is front-loaded as a very subjective experience. I'm like, "This is my opinion as a reader. I'm not always going to agree with critics, and they're not always going to agree with me." And that's not only fine, that's how it should be, because I think pretending to objectivity is silly.

Breckyn: Well, that's a really great point, because there's so much to read. We're sort of so spoiled for choice now in the 21st century, that it's hard to even bother with—it's like, "Who's Charlotte Lennox? Who? Nobody's even heard of her. Who cares? I don't have time." There's a million new books. So why should I go through the dusty old archives of books that nobody even bothers to read anymore? And like, my book club—I can't talk to my book club about it, because everyone will say, "Who is that?" So, I think I've also sort of just assumed, "Oh, we don't read them anymore, so they're probably not good." And that's just not necessarily the case. I love that you're reminding people that, actually, some of these are really worth reading in their own right, and not just because they have the big name of Austen attached to them now.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that there's this sense—at least this is how it felt for me. You have—Austen died so young. She died at 41, right?

Breckyn: Tragedy.

Rebecca: Yes, exactly. Haven't we all felt, "Oh, if she had lived longer, produced more novels"—We have her juvenilia, we have some of her unfinished novels, we also have her six completed novels. That's great. But we're reading and rereading these because we kind of wish, too, that there were more. And it's like, "Yes, tragedy. She died young." And also, we can read the books that she loved, that were working in the same courtship novel tradition, that were influencing her as she was writing. So, it's a kind of "Yes, and" situation. Yes, we love Austen, and if you like this type of novel, there is more, in fact.

Breckyn: Yeah, definitely. So, because I'm obviously pretty steeped in Austen lore, I recognize a lot of the names listed in your table of contents. You've already named them: Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth. They come up a lot when you read about Austen. And I know about Hannah More because my good friend and former podcast guest, Brenda Cox, writes about Jane Austen and Christianity, so she's always banging the Hannah More drum. But there are a few names that even I didn't recognize: Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald. Who are these women? And what do we know about their influence on Austen? Tell us a little bit about them.

Rebecca: Okay, I'll describe those three briefly. Charlotte Lennox is a generation before pretty much anyone else in the book. Her best-known book, and the book that we know Austen read, is The Female Quixote, which was issued in 1752. Now, The Female Quixote is, as you might guess, a reference to Don Quixote, Cervantes, and it takes this conceit of someone who is reading those early modern romances and starts acting like that's real life, except what Charlotte Lennox does is transpose that into the life of an aristocratic woman in 18th-century England. And, as a Janeite, you also know that that's pretty much the description of Northanger Abbey, except Northanger Abbey uses Gothic novels. So, we have the same conceit of here is a woman who loves to read, a young woman who hasn't had a lot of interaction with society, and when she first starts going into society, she makes all these mistakes based on what she's reading. And all that Austen is doing is updating that for her generation, because in the 1790s, when she's composing the first version of Northanger Abbey, that is what the big trend is in the novel: the Gothic novel.

So, we already have a very clear structure there, but moreover—she actually talks about this in her letters. She talks about how they're sitting around, they're reading a book, and they don't like the book, and so they put it down, and they pick up a book that they know they're going to like because they're so disappointed with the one they had. They're like, "Oh, we need something that will be good." And so they pick up The Female Quixote, and Austen specifically says, "It's just as good as I remembered it," which is to say this was a reread for her, and it was something reliable that she went back to because she knew it would be good. It's like the comfort reread, just like we use Austen today. That's what she was using Charlotte Lennox for.

Breckyn: That's awesome. Can I tell you my secret desire for a Northanger Abbey update? I want someone to make a Northanger Abbey, but instead the heroine, the Catherine Morland, listens to true crime podcasts and then starts imagining that murders are happening all around her, because it's such a fun—I love that idea of Jane Austen is actually just taking this old story and updating it, and we keep—how many times has that been done with Austen novels? So, I want somebody to do that. That's my idea for a modern Northanger Abbey retelling. Somebody out there, make it for me.

Rebecca: So, there was a—what was that? There was a TV series that was totally The Female Quixote, but it was just—I can't remember. Oh, what was it called? The Remarkable Kimmy Schmidt, something like that?

Breckyn: Yes. Unbreakable. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Rebecca: Unbreakable. She's in a bunker, and she comes out, and her understanding of the world is based on only what she had exposure to in the bunker.

Breckyn: In the '80s?

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. And so, that is a similar conceit. It's an easy conceit to reboot. And the point is, I think that originality is really overrated. Austen was not trying to be original. She was trying to be good. And the fact that she is using similar tropes or similar scenes from other authors—that doesn't mean that she's not good. She's in dialog with them.

Breckyn: Every single Shakespeare play is a retelling of some other play, some other myth, some other—like, he stole this from the Scottish in the 1500s. It's just—yeah, exactly, there's nothing new under the sun. Okay, so that was Charlotte Lennox. Did you want to tell us about Charlotte Smith or Elizabeth Inchbald?

Rebecca: Yes. Charlotte Smith was first a poet, and she became a poet under economic duress because she was married in an economic arrangement between two wealthy families at age 15. In retrospect, she describes that as "sold like a Southdown sheep." It was a terrible situation. She didn't really know him at all, and she was a teenager, and it did not work out very well for her. He was not only profligate, he spent all of their money; he was abusive; he was a terrible man. And by the time that they have had 11 children, he has finally spent all of their available fortune, such that he gets thrown in prison for debt, which is a thing that can happen in the 18th century.

Breckyn: Right. Debtor's prison.

Rebecca: Yes. And when he's in prison—you know she was raised as a genteel lady; she has a great education, but she wasn't raised to make money. She doesn't know about commerce and trade. So she says, "Well, what can I do?" She tries to negotiate with the lawyers and everything, and then she says, "Well, I have been writing these poems for my own enjoyment, maybe I can get those published and get some money from that." So, she does. She publishes a book of sonnets called Elegiac Sonnets, and it becomes a landmark in the history of English poetry.

Breckyn: Wow!

Rebecca: Yes. It's essentially this book that revives the sonnet for English-language poetry tradition. Because you have Milton, in the 17th century, who's doing the sonnet, but by the early 18th century, the sonnet has fallen out of fashion. Augustan poets, like Pope, are not writing sonnets. And then Charlotte Smith is the one who brings it back, and she is explicitly credited as bringing it back by people like Coleridge and Wordsworth. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth are very direct about their reliance on Charlotte Smith and their debt to her. Wordsworth says something along the lines of, "English poetry will never know or admit how much it owes to Charlotte Smith." So, she lays the groundwork for the romantic poet.

Breckyn: And nobody knows her name. No one is talking about her. And yet Wordsworth, who everyone knows, is like, "Well, it was all Charlotte Smith."

Rebecca: Yeah, Wordsworth is very clear about this. He's like, "Charlotte Smith is amazing." And so was Coleridge. Both of them were like, "Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets totally changed poetry." And yet we don't read that anymore. She did start coming back first as a poet, but then what happens is she keeps updating her Elegiac Sonnets just the way Walt Whitman does with Leaves of Grass. She keeps adding to them and selling new editions. That's fine, but it's not enough to support her family, so she starts writing novels, because novels—you get paid by the volume, right? So, she starts writing four- and five-volume novels in order to support her children, because she leaves her husband, Benjamin, and then— that's great, that's wonderful, go her—and now she also has to provide financially for their now 12 children.

Breckyn: Oh, my gosh.

Rebecca: And she does that by writing novels. And so, Jane Austen is reading Charlotte Smith's novels. And in Catharine, or the Bower, which is one of Austen's pieces of juvenilia—written, I think, when she was 16, if I remember correctly—they actually—the characters are having conversations about how much they love Mrs. Smith's novels. And one of the heroines says, "Oh, yes, I love Emmeline far above all the rest," which was Charlotte Smith's first novel. So, I make a few arguments about how I see Charlotte Smith's work play out in Austen's, but I find her a really compelling figure because she essentially used writing to write herself free from this terrible, abusive marriage.

Breckyn: Incredible that she could do that. And it's a little funny when you think, like, if you were to ask someone, "What's a profitable industry that I could go into?" and if they were like—"Poet, I think I'm going to become a poet," everyone would be, like, "Eek" today, but in the 18th century—I'm so happy that that worked out for her.

Rebecca: Well, I will say that the publisher did not give her much hope. The publisher was like, "This won't sell."

Breckyn: And then she just single-handedly changed English poetry.

Rebecca: And then, yeah, she was just that great. But too—I mean, that's also why she moved to novels, because poetry didn't—I make this joke in the book, something like "Poetry paid, but even in the 18th century it didn't pay that well." You know, she was a novelist under duress. Left to her druthers, she probably would have just stayed with poetry, but novels are where she could make the most money. So, she wrote novels out of economic necessity. I think that's part of what gets people down on her; a lot of her novels are very long, and they're probably too long. Most of them should be three volumes instead of four or five, but she needed to be paid.

Breckyn: Yeah. When you're paid by the word, you just keep on clacking away, keep on writing away.

Rebecca: She was incredibly prolific and very popularly read and respected during this—particularly the era of the late 1780s and 1790s, when Austen was doing a lot of novel reading, formative novel reading.

Breckyn: Well, this is a great spot for me to read this quote, because I love this quote from Northanger Abbey. I actually have been to Jane Austen's grave in Winchester and read this with my—we gathered around and we read this quote aloud. It's a little bit abridged for people who are listening. I have a couple of ellipses in here, but I'm just going to read this part from Northanger Abbey, where she gives a shout out to all of her fellow lady novelists. She says,

while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England . . . are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. . . . "And what are you reading, Miss —?" "Oh, it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with an affected indifference or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda," or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

And that is just mic drop. Just walk away, Jane Austen. That kind of moves me to tears. I think that is so beautiful, and that's sort of what your book is about.

Rebecca: Yeah, I use that passage as the inspiration for the scope, because she mentioned Cecilia, Camilla, and Belinda. So, my scope for Jane Austen's Bookshelf—Cecilia and Camilla are by Frances Burney, and Belinda is by Maria Edgeworth—so my bookshelf is from Burney to Edgeworth. That passage speaks to Austen being this great advocate for the genre as a whole. The development of the novel was met with a lot of criticism and a lot of moral skepticism—not from everyone and not for every novelist or novel—but it was part of the milieu that, if you were writing novels or reading them a lot, that was something possibly to be embarrassed by at the very least. I mean, that was the main reason why Frances Burney didn't want her family, or her father in particular, to know that she was the author of Evelina—that she was afraid that he would be ashamed. So, the context for Austen saying that is a real one. This isn't a no-stakes situation where it's like, "Oh, I can have a strong opinion because no one cares." No, a lot of people cared, actually. They were fighting against her still more, even.

Breckyn: Huge social stigma. And I'm not the first to say this, but it's sort of like, if you want something immediately discounted and discredited, just say that teenage girls like it, and then automatically it's not worthwhile, or of value, or serious. It's like, "Oh, well, that's just what teenage girls like."

Rebecca: There's a review of a Piozzi book that uses that. So, Piozzi wrote a book called Retrospection, which is like a history of the world. And it's the first history of the world written by an English woman, according to the scholar—I think his name is William McCarthy. And one of the contemporary reviews of it was, "Oh, this is just for schoolgirl misses."

Breckyn: And one of those schoolgirl misses grows up to be Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Breckyn: Anyway, so we've sort of touched on this, but I feel like we went in a different direction. These women were all more successful and widely known in their lifetimes than Austen was in hers.

Rebecca: Correct.

Breckyn: So, why exactly have they fallen off our book shelves? Do you have—can you give us that in a nutshell?

Rebecca: Well, I can't, because it's different for every woman. Every chapter I specifically go into it. I mean, if you want to be glib about it, which I don't love—there's a reason I made this a book and not an article. Like, sexism absolutely played a part here. You know, women had all of the usual standards for quality that anyone would have to pass, and also, they were judged by their gender. They were. Males were judged neutrally, as if gender didn't play a part, and women were judged as if their gender always did play a part. And so, that creates an extra valence to all of these mechanics that happen to any author about why they might be remembered or not over the years. And so, again, I don't think it's as simple as that. I think that's an added layer. It is the single thing that connects them, given that I'm focusing women authors, but it's different for every single one of them.

As I said early on, a big part of why I think Ann Radcliffe fell out of fashion was simply because we had so little information about her, that she did not have the same critical apparatus for people to write about her the way that people like Austen, or even Edgeworth or Burney, get written about. Burney's diaries coming out was a huge literary event in the Victorian era, just as the memoir of Jane Austen was a huge event in the rise of Austen's reputation. Ann Radcliffe doesn't get any of that. So that's not sexism. That is very much more based in the fact that she was so private. She didn't want her personal details out there.

And then there are other cases, like Piozzi. She is remembered, but she's remembered under a different name. She's remembered as Mrs. Thrale. She's remembered for the era when she was friends with Samuel Johnson, not for the era when she was actually publishing, which was when she was in her second marriage as Piozzi. And so that's an interesting mechanism, right—that Samuel Johnson was just the more overwhelming figure, just like Austen is sort of a more overwhelming figure next to someone like Burney. So, lots of different mechanisms, lots of different ways that people can fall in and out of popular knowledge.

Breckyn: Yeah. And so people will have to just go and read it to find out all the details.  So, I saw a video of yours on Instagram in which you call Sense and Sensibility Austen's most overrated novel, which, first of all, makes me want to challenge you to pistols at dawn.

Rebecca: Let's do it.

Breckyn: But setting aside my personal—actually, I would lose. It would be terrible. Setting aside my personal preferences, why do you think that's so? And what are some other books from that era that you think are more well-written than Sense and Sensibility that some of our listeners maybe could pick up?

Rebecca: Okay, so, people got so mad about that video. And I get it, because we all have our favorite books, and we will—as you say, we will challenge anyone to a duel. First of all, I want to make it clear, overrated does not mean bad. Those are two different things. My point is, I think that Sense and Sensibility is often put up next to Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and I don't think that's right. And I think structurally and stylistically you can explain why that is. It's really as simple as that. And I talk about it in the video very briefly. We don't need to nitpick it here. I have a problem with how the ending wraps up. I think the ending is forced in a way that none of her other books are. And I will say, though, again, I love Sense and Sensibility. Let me be clear. It's a great book.

Breckyn: You don't have to defend yourself. It's okay.

Rebecca: But it's not a defense. It's true. Me saying it's overrated does not mean it's bad. It does not mean I don't like it. It's a great book. In fact, one of my favorite bits of dialog is in Sense and Sensibility. It's that early one when John Dashwood and his wife are arguing, and Fanny very slowly convinces him bit by bit—

Breckyn: To lower the amount of money that she's going to give away, and then it ends up being nothing.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that is brilliant. I think it's one of the great examples of Austen's use of dialog that she does particularly well in Pride and Prejudice. So, yeah, I am a big fan of people who have strong opinions, well-argued, even if I don't agree with you. So, if you feel otherwise, cool. I don't have a problem with that. But I do think that, personally, I would put other novels higher than where it traditionally tends to fall in the ranking of Austen novels on their own. And again, I mean on their own. I'm not talking about its objectively overrated for the time period or something. It's not. It's absolutely amazing.

There are lots of novels, though, from that era that are now completely underrated. And essentially, I would point to pretty much any book written by Maria Edgeworth. I love Maria Edgeworth. I love her books. Where do I even start? So, courtship novels like Belinda or Helen—Helen comes out—it's like the last book of Maria Edgeworth's, it's like in the 1830s. Those are both great books if you like the courtship novel type of book like Austen.

If you just want to read general novels that are amazing—I mean, technically, Harrington is a courtship novel, but it's from the hero's point of view. It follows the man. Harrington was a shocking read to me. It felt so modern and so good. It's essentially about a guy who grows up in this environment where he is just culturally fed anti-Semitism, and he just takes that in, and that sets up a situation for him where he starts to fall in love with this woman from a Jewish family. And this entire book was inspired by a letter from a fan, because, in one of Maria Edgeworth's best books—best-known, most acclaimed books, it was called The Absentee—there is an anti-Semitic stereotypical character in it, like he was like a villain type. And there's this woman named Rachel from the United States who writes a letter to Maria Edgeworth and says—

Breckyn: Wait, did she write to Charles Dickens, too? Because there is an exact same story.

Rebecca: Oh, I don't know. A similar thing?

Breckyn: Yes. No, I read a picture book with my children about a Jewish woman from the Americas who writes a letter to Charles Dickens saying, "Hey, I'm Jewish, and I don't like the portrayal of Jews in your books; that's very mean and anti-Semitic." And he ends up writing another novel. And see, I don't know Dickens well enough to know which one it was. But he then ends up writing a sympathetic Jewish character. I wonder if it's the same woman.

Rebecca: Yeah, maybe. She writes Maria Edgeworth, and she says, "You have so much complexity and realism in your characters. I don't understand why you would rely on these anti-Semitic tropes when you clearly know better as a writer. What are you doing?" And Maria Edgeworth was like, "Right, what am I doing? Why am I doing this?" And so, she has this moment of personal reckoning where she says, "Why did I just imbibe all of that anti-Semitism thoughtlessly?" And then she puts that into the character, the character kind of being like, "Why?" He, very early on, has these really important relationships, mentorships with older Jewish men who are incredibly important in his life. And in the meantime, his family is like, "Why are you hanging out with that Jewish guy?" And so that tension is throughout. It's a courtship novel, technically, but the hero is one of these romantic-era heroes. So, if you like, say, the Brontës—if you like Charlotte Brontë—you should read Harrington. It is so good.

Breckyn: Is there brooding? Is there a lot of brooding?

Rebecca: There's so much brooding. I mean, it is not Wuthering Heights, like evil people kind of thing.

Breckyn: No, I don't want Wuthering Heights. I just want a Rochester-level brooding.

Rebecca: Yes. We're squarely Charlotte Brontë, not Emily.

Breckyn: Emily is the crazy one.

Rebecca: So, yeah, as you can tell, I can go on about Maria Edgeworth. My personal favorite is a book called Ennui. But it is—to me, you could put up just about any Maria Edgeworth book and just try it, and it will be good.

Breckyn: Okay. Is it true that hers are also not terribly long? Because I think—

Rebecca:  Correct.

Breckyn: One of the things that turns me off from the novels of that time period—like I know that Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson was one of Jane Austen's favorites. She loved it. She mentions it in her letters. It comes up a lot, but I'm like, "That thing is a thousand pages. I'm never going to read that." But then somebody told me, "Oh, Belinda's really short." I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to add that to my TBR list."

Rebecca: Yes. Most of Maria Edgeworth's books—I mean, Patronage is kind of long; that was published in four volumes. But Harrington was published with another book called Ormond in a triple decker, which is, say, three volumes. Helen is three volumes, which is the length of Austen's; you know, except Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, hers are all three volumes. And Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, and Ennui are novella length. Ennui, which, again, is my favorite, I read in a single afternoon.

Breckyn: Okay, see, that's what I need at this stage of my life. That's awesome. Because honestly, I think that's a big barrier for a lot of people, is that these old books seem insurmountable. And if they're also going to be boring or not as good as Austen, then what's the point? But, if you can just sample it in an afternoon, then I would be a lot more willing to try it.

Okay, so one interesting aspect of your job is your recurring appearances on the History Channel's hugely popular show, Pawn Stars. You've been their rare book specialist since 2011. What are some of your favorite experiences you've had on that show? And have you assessed any Austen or Austen-adjacent books for them?

Rebecca: I have not assessed any Austen for them. In fact, I have assessed very few women authors at all for them, which I have pointed out to them on numerous occasions, but it's not up to them. I mean, they are only showing me what they're being offered. But I have found that incredibly remarkable. I've done a Willa Cather book. I've done a Harper Lee. But, truly, it has been frustrating and ridiculous how few authors are women that have been offered for me to be able to evaluate on the show. So, yeah, that's really stuck out to me over the years. Again, not intentionally on their side, because they're forwarding me, you know, whatever they're getting. But it gives you a sense of what their audience esteems as important.

Breckyn: Right, and those larger outside influences that we were talking about earlier, like in the forces of the publishing industry or the forces of antiquarianism and what people think is going to last, or what people think is valuable. That's interesting. Well, so you handle absolute treasures all the time for your job. Do you still get excited by it?

Rebecca: Oh, yeah. Oh, every day. Every day.

Breckyn: Are there any titles or authors in particular that you just love to come across, or are there any that have eluded you? Do you have your white whale out there?

Rebecca: Yeah, I suppose I have my white whales, but I—my job is one that is just simply based in enthusiasm, right? I am really excited by this material, and I am a professional enabler. What I like is that someone else is really obsessive about something, such that they're willing to spend a lot of money for something that they could easily read online, right? That's kind of what I do. So, it's like, "You're not buying this book because you want to read it. You're buying it because it has some symbolic value to you." So for me, when people say, "Oh, what's your favorite book that you've handled?" it's like, "Well, what's some that I've handled recently?" Because inevitably, it's something amazing. One thing I just sold last week was the first—what we call the editio princeps, which is essentially the first printed edition of a manuscript work. It was the first printed edition of Gawain and the Green Knight.

Breckyn: Whoa.

Rebecca: Yeah. And it was actually quite late because the story of the manuscript—that, that manuscript and Beowulf, survive only in single, unique copies that were preserved by a collector, this guy named Robert Cotton, whose library forms the foundation of the British Library. So, they're in the British Library, and they're only known those one copies [sic]. Before Cotton's library ended up at the British Museum—what would become the British Museum—it actually was subject to a fire, and about four-tenths of it was destroyed. So think about that. Four-tenths of this library that has the only surviving copies of Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight disappeared.

Breckyn: It's unthinkable.

Rebecca: So on the one hand, we have these two works—these amazing, important works in the history of English literature—because of him, and on the other hand, what else may have been in there?

Breckyn: It's like the library at Alexandria, or anything that was ransacked by the Vikings. You're like, "What would we have if it wasn't for that?"  So do you—I guess that's a follow-up question—do you deal with handwritten things and manuscripts as well, or is that an adjacent industry, or…?

Rebecca: It is technically—it does have its own skillset. However, if you are a rare book dealer, you have to develop that skillset, too, because you're going to have to handle signed copies of books, signed and inscribed copies. And you need to be able to evaluate those signatures. You have to. And, if you're doing that—if you're already paying attention to materiality, like ink and paper that's part of the job with books, then you are developing that skillset with manuscripts. It's much more of a question of time period. You know, just handling a 20th-century manuscript is very different than handling a 15th-century manuscript.

Breckyn: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, that is incredible and dreamy. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Rebecca. Where can listeners learn more about you and your work?

Rebecca: You can find me in two different places, depending on what you're interested in. If you're interested in the rare book side, you want to see my shop, then you want to go to Type Punch Matrix. That's the name of my shop: typepunchmatrix.com. And we have a mailing list. We do print catalogs. You can poke around in our subject areas, all of that. I'm actually doing a big Jane Austen Bookshelf display at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair that's happening in April. So, I do have that type of stuff come into my professional rare book dealer life. And then aside from that, if you just want to see what I'm doing as an author, or things on social media, I'm very findable at rebeccaromney.com or rebecca.romney on Instagram, etc., etc.

Breckyn: Yeah. I started following you on Instagram in preparation for this interview, and it is so dreamy to just scroll through all—she has all these photos and videos of just gorgeous old books and with incredible endpages—that's what they're called, right?—the marbling, on some of them. You have whole sets of illustrated endpages, which the artwork in there is so amazing. All right. Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Thank you for having me.

Breckyn: All right, listeners, here’s your monthly dose of JASNA news.

Jennifer Jones:  Hello Austen Chat! The Internet and news feeds are abuzz with celebrations and plans to mark Jane Austen’s 250th birthday this year. Did you know that the largest literary conference dedicated to this milestone is happening in Baltimore, Maryland, this October? That’s right! JASNA’s 2025 AGM will mark this anniversary year with the theme “Austen at 250: ‘No check to my genius from beginning to end.’” It will be a celebration of her life and literary genius.

My name is Jennifer Jones, and I am the coordinator for this year’s AGM. Activities will kick off Wednesday, October 8, and go through Monday, October 13, with the core conference Friday to Sunday. There will be excellent plenary speakers many regular Austen Chat listeners will recognize: Paula Byrne, Juliette Wells, Vanessa Riley, Janine Barchas, Inger Brodey, Collins Hemingway, Devoney Looser, and John Mullan.

We just announced three in-person special guest speakers. Susannah Harker, who played Jane Bennet in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice; Deborah Charlton, leader of the archaeological investigation at the Steventon Rectory, Austen’s birthplace; and Caroline Knight, Austen’s five-times-grandniece and one of the last Knights to live at Chawton House. The schedule is so full of exceptional content that a few breakouts are scheduled Thursday night this year. From the Wednesday night movie screening, to workshops and tours, to breakout presentations given by speakers from nine countries, to the ever-popular ball, there is something for everyone.  

In order to attend an AGM, you must be a current member of JASNA, but dues are as little as $30 a year and a student membership is still free through 2025. Visit jasna.org/join to learn more. 

Registration for this once-in-a-lifetime AGM experience will open at two times on June 19 to allow for time zone differences. Make sure you will be ready by perusing the preview brochure and the latest details at jasna.org/agms/baltimore2025/home.php. See you in Baltimore!

Breckyn: Now it's time for "In Her Own Words," a segment where listeners share a favorite Austen quote or two.

Jennifer Bettiol: Hello, this is Jennifer Bettiol from the Vancouver, Canada Region. "Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross, to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea. She had never been staying there before, without being struck by it, or without wishing that other Elliots could have her advantage in seeing how unknown, or unconsidered there, were the affairs which at Kellynch Hall were treated as of such general publicity and pervading interest; yet, with all this experience, she believed she must now submit to feel that another lesson, in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle, was become necessary for her . . . .

Once again, I think Jane Austen hits the nail on the head. Thank you.

Breckyn:  Dear listeners, I just wanted to end today's episode by saying thank you. Austen Chat now has over 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We are thrilled, and so grateful for everyone who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please consider giving the show five stars on Apple podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it is for new Janeites to find us. Join us again next month for another episode. In the meantime, I remain yours affectionately, Breckyn Wood.

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