Andrew S. Berish's "Hating Jazz"

Andrew S. Berish is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s.

Berish applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse, and reported the following:

Opening Hating Jazz to page 99 takes you to first page of chapter four, “The Musicians Suck: Contempt and Disgust in the Historical Reception of Jazz.” This is the penultimate chapter of the book and covers the kinds of jazz hating that happen—perhaps surprisingly—within the jazz community: critics savaging musicians, musicians denouncing critics, and musicians attacking each other. The title comes from an interview with saxophonist Branford Marsalis: in an April 2019 interview with Rachel Olding of the Sydney Morning Herald, Marsalis, reflecting on why the music is so unpopular says, “the answer is simple: the musicians suck.” It is one thing to criticize another musician, but Marsalis offers something much stronger, an expression of contempt toward others in the jazz community. In the rest of the chapter I trace the history of these kinds of responses, responses where jazz friends “fire” on each other. From the battles in the 1930s and 40s between the proponents of New Orleans-style small group jazz and the new sounds of the big bands to the polarizing debates about free jazz in the 1950s and 60s to the more recent discussions of jazz’s relationship to rap and hip-hop, jazz history has been defined by these explosive debates full of aggression, contempt, and disgust. There are many reasons for this, but at its heart, such overheated attacks are rooted in love—only a profound betrayal of values can unleash such negativity. As Freud noted long ago, love and hate are twins.

The opening of chapter four on page 99 lays out the stakes of this love-hate dynamic: jazz musicians play to create and share profound emotional experiences of sound and community. A key foundational argument for the book is the idea that attacks on music—on the specific sounds that musicians make—is only half the story. What also matters are people. Hating (and loving) jazz is a social act. For a music born in the Black American experience, jazz has been, from the beginning, about race, specifically Blackness and whiteness. Loving and hating jazz has always been about the lived Black experience but also the representations and images of that experience. This gives arguments about jazz enormous social significance. We are never arguing only about sounds we find pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or infuriating, but about the meanings those sounds have for our very sense of self in a society shaped by the distortions of racial thinking. Hating—and loving—jazz exists at the intersection of sound, feeling, and social life. Although my book is focused on the specific history of jazz, these arguments are applicable to all kinds of music: heavy metal, pop, rap and hip-hop, and country. In the study of popular music history, focusing on the negative reception of a style or genre—from statements of mild dislike to tirades filled with contempt and disgust—reveal with great clarity the profound social stakes in our musical tastes.

Visit Andrew S. Berish's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda M. Greenwell's "The Child Gaze"

Amanda M. Greenwell is associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in African American Review; Children’s Literature; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; The Lion and the Unicorn; Studies in the Novel; Studies in the American Short Story, and other publications.

Greenwell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of the book, they’d learn that the narrative technique I term the transactional child gaze “does not simply locate the child in the ideological environment…[but rather] enmesh[es] the child with the environment in the moment of seeing, binding them together in the ongoing alchemy of subjectivity and perspective.” The page emphasizes the necessity of active, ongoing reflection on the part of the literary child who looks transactionally, which asserts the child as “extant and active” within systems often built to oppress them. Children who look transactionally are depicted as enormously affected by their environments, but not necessarily deterministically; the transactional child gaze, due to the child’s agency, is a potentially destabilizing force.

Page 99 falls on the third page of chapter three, and it hosts a great passage to help readers understand the premise of the chapter, though not the whole book. It captures some of the key introductory concepts that will be explored later in the section through close readings of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Ultimately, the chapter argues that “the transactional child gaze allows an interrogation of the ideological scripts that are brought to bear upon the child as well as the visual methods by which they interpellate the subject” (131).

The page only manages to convey a hint of the larger scope of the project, however. It makes brief reference to the appreciative child gaze and the countersurveillant child gaze, which are discussed in chapters one and two, respectively, but it does not describe those modes of gazing. Readers will have to visit those chapters to learn how and to what effect the appreciative child gaze conjures reactions along a spectrum of celebration to weighty consideration, and to understand the various methods by which a countersurvelliant child gaze creates striking indictments of abusive power on the level of narrative, even when child looking does not effect real change within the storyworld of the text. And nothing on page 99 would point readers to the fourth chapter, which explores the manifestation of these various modes of child gazing on the comics page, including depictions of the direct gaze, which implicates the reader through the fourth wall.

The central premise of the book might be inferred from page 99: that literary texts invoke several modes of child looking to perform social critique. However, it would not make clear how the book draws on work in the cultural history of the American child, children’s literature, rhetorical and critical race narratology, visual culture studies, and several other fields to craft a critical conversation that helps us comprehend the various ways US texts from the 1930s to the 2010s employed nuanced child gazing to talk back to hegemonic US structures of national belonging. And readers would miss out on the call for further work on the child gaze in the future!

Learn more about The Child Gaze at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Rose Hejtmanek's "The Cult of CrossFit"

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Professor of Anthropology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop: An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody and co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist. She is also a world and national champion in masters weightlifting.

Hejtmanek applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Fitness Phenomenon tells the story of the CrossFit Hero WOD Murph. Hero WODs are very difficult workout of the day (WOD) named for a fallen US soldier usually during the war on terror. Murph is named after Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL, and his favorite workout that he called “body armor.” The page provides granular detail of Murph and how CrossFitters relate to this workout, especially as it is performed on the American holiday of Memorial Day. However, the larger story of CrossFit in the United States I try and examine in the book is not part of page 99.

I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book because page 99 is about Murph, one small piece of the CrossFit puzzle, one (important) tree in a very large unexamined-on-page-99-forest.

So, what’s the forest?

The Cult of CrossFit is a book constructed through my anthropological investigations of and embodied commitment to CrossFit workouts like Murph. But CrossFit isn’t just about the workouts. It’s a whole forest of frameworks, beliefs, devotions, communities, futures, pasts, ideologies, and stories that are lived out and built into a CrossFitter’s body, gym, and community. Based on seven years of anthropological research on six continents, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how American CrossFit organizes, frames, and sells this forest using what I call cultural Christianity. This isn’t the Christianity preached in the church. It is the everyday Christianity that permeates much of the United States: in the holidays we have, sayings we use (bless you), and redemption stories we tell based on hundreds of years of history. Thus, the book is as much about American history and culture as it is about CrossFit. Using the lens of CrossFit, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how violent, militaristic, devotional American culture and nationalism get embodied, one workout at a time. While page 99 goes into detail about one punishing, military-infused workout, Murph, it leaves out the larger context of suffering, devotion, salvation, forms of oracle and garage capitalism, illusions of science, and understandings of the apocalypse that are also part of American CrossFit.

I encourage you to read the rest of the book if you are interested in a detailed history and cultural analysis of how the brand and community of CrossFit, which includes Murph, became the phenomenon that it is.

Visit Katie Rose Hejtmanek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arie W. Kruglanski and Sophia Moskalenko's "The Psychology of the Extreme"

Arie W. Kruglanski is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and a co-founding PI at START, the national center of excellence for the study of terrorism and the response to terrorism.

Sophia Moskalenko is a Research Fellow at Georgia State University and a Program Management Specialist at the UN Office of Counter Terrorism, Behavioral Insights Hub.

Moskalenko applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Psychology of the Extreme, and reported the following:

A reader opening the book to page 99 would read about the violent extremism of two Islamic fundamentalists who conducted mass casualty attacks: one against Israelis in Israel, and the other against Americans in Iraq. The page touches upon the psychology that is needed to overcome the normal human resistance to violence, such as the influence of extremist narratives of terrorist groups, the pain of personal humiliations experienced by the attackers, and the motivation to restore the loss of significance.

This page is perhaps not the best representation of the book. Especially because the book’s message was to broaden the understanding of extremism: from the malicious actions of terrorists to the great deeds of luminaries such as Maria Sklodowska-Curie, humanitarians such as Mahatma Gandhi, artistic geniuses like Van Gogh, and other extremists whose pursuit of their passions positively contributed to culture, technology, arts, and sciences. What’s more, the book makes the case that extremism is far more prevalent than these famous cases. It extends to our friends and neighbors (and maybe ourselves)­­––those who give their best efforts and sacrifice for a hobby, a job, an obsession, a relationship, or an addiction. In other words, the book presents extremism as not rare, and that it’s becoming more frequent with the advent of the internet and social media that encourage comparisons, competition, and as a result, extremism.

It helps to see extremism through this wider lens because we can see its origins. Extremism develops in social isolation, often as a result of rejection, bullying, and ostracism. It is often encouraged by radical groups through narratives that glorify self-sacrifice. Stories of heroes overcoming the odds are riveting and inspire emulation. Extremism is glorified by modern Western culture. What hides behind this façade are the costs of extremism, even the constructive kind: to the extremists themselves, their loved ones, and to societal peace and harmony. Through case studies and psychology research, the book shows that moderation, kindness, and diligence can often succeed where extremism fails miserably. Seeing extremism for what it is allows us to make better, more informed choices in our Age of Extremism.

Learn more about The Psychology of the Extreme at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's "The Politics of Sorrow"

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is a professor of literature and creative writing at Villanova University. She is the author of the poetry collections My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and Rules of the House (2002), as well as the memoir Coming Home to Tibet (2016). Her mother served as a member of parliament in the exile government for three terms.

Dhompa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, and reported the following:

On this page I write about Tenzin Norbu, a monk I interviewed in Bir, India in 2015. Norbu defined the campaign of “unity,” (led by a Tibetan political party in the 1960s) as a responsibility disproportionately placed on new minority populations in exile.

For him, unity had spelled erasure…Tenzin Norbu insisted he desired to be ‘heard’ by the exile government, which I interpreted as his and the Thirteen’s desire to be included in the narrative of the united nation. Separation was most certainly not on his mind.

My first thought on scanning the page (the first half of the page describes a historical event in the seventh century) was that it didn’t provide a good idea of the whole work but on a closer examination I was stunned at how this page indeed gets to the heart of what the book is about: recognition and belonging in exile.

Tenzin Norbu lived in one of the refugee settlements established by the Group of Thirteen and he felt the group had been miscast as antigovernment simply because they were slow to embrace some of the policies enforced by the Tibetan United Party (a powerful organization in the 1960s-70s in the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal). Norbu felt that the project of unity led by the United Party was exclusionary. He stated that he never got the chance to explain why he was hesitant to follow their call to unity. His understanding of events and experience of events confirmed his fear that unity meant a standardization of Tibetan identity to a homogenous formation. His desire was to be integrated in a meaningful way. He was asking important questions: What is the relationship between the government and the people? Where are we going? Who is included in the story of the nation?

The book focuses on the first two decades of life for Tibetans who had fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and found themselves refugees in India and Nepal. In addition to the difficult task of organizing an anti-colonial national movement, and establishing a government-in-exile, the community had to respond to complex internal tensions over what it meant to be a Tibetan. While it was easy to galvanize Tibetans to identify a shared timeline to the loss of a nation or feel certainty in not being Chinese, building solidarity behind the idea of what made a Tibetan, a Tibetan proved more complex because people had come from diverse regions and from a variety of political and social formations. The story of the Thirteen in The Politics of Sorrow is a glimpse of exile history from the periphery.

Learn more about The Politics of Sorrow at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Crosbie's "The Political Army"

Thomas Crosbie is associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He is the editor of Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series and Military Politics: New Perspectives (2023), among other books.

Crosbie applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of The Political Army will bring you to the beginning of Chapter 4, which is about what I refer to as “the Tet Paradox”. This chapter is essential to the argument of the book, but let us consider the contents of page 99 exclusively. You’ll start the page reading about “black teams” of assassins (members of the US armed services acting without attribution) killing suspected members of the Viet Cong. You will quickly recognize that you’re in the middle of the Vietnam War, looking over the shoulder of US government officials. From the assassins, we make our way over to an awkward exchange between Gen. William Westmoreland, US commander in Vietnam, and Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the chief of the Army back home. And then we get another awkward exchange, this time between Westmoreland and Adm. U.S.G. Sharp. Both Johnson and Sharp were annoyed at Westmoreland’s poor handling of the American journalists reporting on the war. From the exchanges, we learn that far from the press being intractable and out to get the military, there was in fact a high degree of willingness among journalists to work with the Army – but at the same time, a very limited tolerance for Army commanders who wanted to dissemble and mislead. We end the page of another dark note: more public outrage at clumsy efforts to mislead the media, and a nightmarish discover: mass rape and murder at a small hamlet called My Lai.

Readers interested in The Political Army would do well to read page 99, since it does indeed give a feel for the key themes of the work. The Political Army painstakingly reconstructs the U.S. military’s attempts to manage the media in various theaters of operations from World War II to Desert Storm. In some ways, a key theme is repetition: the repeating of mistakes by military leaders like Westmoreland who time and again got their relations with the press wrong; by journalists, who discover the same sorts of stories – of atrocity and mismanagement, and sometimes of human decency amidst the horrors of war; and finally, the Groundhog Day-like experience of public affairs officers, forced to defend again and again the need for an intelligent and democratic attitude toward the press. Page 99 does not quite do justice to the arc of the story, however. The book’s story begins at a time when the media’s own view of its role in war had yet to form. As the Army began to learn about the risks and opportunities represented by the media, Army leaders tended to focus on the potential benefits: the media could help sell the Army’s story to the American public. Optimism gave way to reckless utopian thinking, and the result was a disastrous mismatch between the Army’s expectations and the media’s interests in the beginning of the Vietnam War. Eventually, the Tet Paradox (named for US responses to the North Vietnamese invasion during the festival of Tet in 1968) became apparent to Army leaders: even battlefield victory could appear like a major defeat if journalists presented it that way. What page 99 does not show the reader is the hard battles that followed Vietnam, and which allowed the Army to finally come to terms with the critical role of media management in the success of military operations. Readers are therefore encouraged to read the book in the traditional way: starting with page 1, you will find yourself flicking quickly through the pages until you reach page 216, which ends with some prophetic words about why we cannot afford to ignore the democracies of war and the role of the military in actively supporting democracy. I leave it to readers’ own imaginations to untangle whether such prophecies have merit in the dark days of Trump.

Learn more about The Political Army at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Paul Kelleher's "The Social Cost of Carbon"

J. Paul Kelleher is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research and teaching explore ethical and other philosophical dimensions of public policy, especially climate policy and health policy.

Kelleher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Social Cost of Carbon: Ethics and the Limits of Climate Change Economics, and reported the following:

If readers opened my book to page 99 they would definitely get a good feel for the thing as a whole. They would quickly see that the book is technical and not an easy read for the layperson. I realize this admission is not going to help me sell books, but I also believe in full disclosure! Still, even the uninitiated reader can get a good sense of the book's motivations and aims by reading its accessible and short stage-setting preface, the preprint version of which is available here.

Page 99 of the book has me discussing an important topic in climate change economics, namely the "pure time discount rate." Evaluative economic models of climate change typically assume that if a benefit or harm will come later in time, it is for that reason less worth caring about than if it would be experienced today. Page 99 considers one of the arguments for holding this view, an argument concerning uncertainty. Later in chapter 5 I provide a much longer discussion of pure time discounting in climate change economics and in welfare economics more generally.

After that discussion of pure time discounting, page 99 also kicks off my explanation and analysis of a very important theorem of welfare economics, John Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem. (Harsanyi won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, but for work done in another area of economics.) Harsanyi's theorem provides an axiomatic basis for broadly utilitarian welfare economics, which is the economic framework that underpins many evaluations of climate change policy. But most climate economists do not draw on Harsanyi's theorem. If they give any consideration at all to the theoretical foundations of their models, they are likely to invoke distinct utilitarian theorems that I analyze elsewhere in the book. The discussion that begins on page 99 ends with my commending Harsanyi's theorem to climate economists. I think it is the proper foundation for evaluative climate change economics, and the book as a whole argues for this.

Visit J. Paul Kelleher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wallace's "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto"

Benjamin Wallace is the author of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, an investigation into the murky origins of cryptocurrency.

Earlier work includes his book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, an instant New York Times bestseller which The Economist called “a great tale, well told” and the Times described as “one of the rare books on wine that transcends the genre.”

Wallace applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto finds me coming to doubt that computer scientist Nick Szabo, a usual suspect in the perennial efforts to figure out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (in 2015, the New York Times called him the person Silicon Valley insiders believed to be Nakamoto), is in fact Nakamoto. My creeping doubt is both forensic and intuitive. I point out inconsistencies in the details of the case for Szabo as Nakamoto, and also some personality discrepancies.

To the extent that page 99 shows me as the narrator-investigator, in the weeds evaluating a particular candidate and bringing fresh eyes to a stubborn problem, and captures the book's milieu of libertarian computer science, it’s fairly representative. This is a detective story, and there I am detecting. On the other hand, it’s one of the more heady moments in the book, in contrast to plenty of more visceral moments—including a car chase, a visit to a room full of frozen heads and bodies in the Arizona desert, and a bloody incident with a machete—so I wouldn’t say it perfectly captures the experience of reading this book.

One other way in which page 99 Isn’t entirely representative: I wrote this book because I became convinced that the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the efforts, including my own, to crack it, was both a gripping story in its own right and an organic way for a civilian to gain an understanding of the whole crypto phenomenon. It’s a Trojan horse of sorts, which I’m not sure comes through clearly on this particular page.

Learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.

Writers Read: Benjamin Wallace (February 2008).

The Page 99 Test: The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Bloom's "Veiled Threats"

Mia Bloom is a Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University and the International Security Fellow at New America. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing, with Roy Licklider; (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011), Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019), and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, with Sophia Moskalenko (2021).

Bloom applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad, and reported the following:

If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.

While the majority of the book is dedicated to the women who exercised agency and joined the jihad, perpetrated acts of terrorism, or recruited others to do so, page 99 explores the ramifications of women’s involvement with Jihadi groups and offers the reader detailed information about the victims.

The book as a whole explores whether women in Jihadi groups were nothing more than victims of men or the patriarchal society. In some instances, the woman have been drugged or manipulated, especially the very young girls who were operatives for Boko Haram. Perhaps the most surprising part of the book, is that what we think we know about women in Boko Haram, or ISIS or Al Qaeda is superficial and stereotypes. The women in these militant groups exercised considerably more agency than the literature has previously allocated them. While women in ISIS did not fight on the front lines, many were as radical if not more radical than their husbands. The lesson patriarchal groups learn is that if you get the women on board, you guarantee the next generation of extremists and make the organization immune to counter terror policies like targeted assassination.

The book also probes how jihadi groups legally differentiate between female hostages (rahina) versus sex slaves (sabayya), drawing on Islamic law and applied to the events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Southern Israel. By the Islamic rules of war, what occurred in Southern Israel in 2023 violates multiple hadith and surahs in the Quran. The book presents a theory of why gender-based violence occurs during certain types of ethnic wars in which the ultimate goal is the control of territory, making violence against civilians intentional to force them to abandon their homes and flee. Thus Veiled Threats offers a corrective to the inaccurate stereotypes about veiled women being powerless, voiceless and faceless in the global jihad.

Learn more about Veiled Threats at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Todd's "Living with Jane Austen"

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:

This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:

I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.

The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.

Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.

In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.

For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!

Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)

Visit Janet Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue