Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels by Rachel Cohen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

By Ann Fabian

Back in 2004, a friend gave me a copy of Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Artists and Writers, 1854-1967. She thought I’d like the book. She was right. A Chance Meeting weaves together 36 stories about American artists and writers. It opens with the day a young Henry James, out walking with his father, dropped by the Broadway studio of photographer Mathew Brady. It ends with an encounter between writer Norman Mailer (drunk) and poet Robert Lowell, both in Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. Cohen writes with wonderful confidence about novelists, photographers, poets and painters.

That first encounter had me watching for Cohen—a writer with an eclectic imagination, a smart reader of books and a keen observer of art. In 2013, she published a biography of art dealer Bernard Berenson. Finishing that book, she married and had a daughter. Her father grew gravely ill. And she took to reading Jane Austen. Austen “became my only author,” she says.

Like every new mother and fresh mourner, Cohen lived “with one eye on the laundry and one eye on the reckoning.“ She read and reread Austen’s novels. She read literary critics, biographers, historians, essayists and reviewers who appreciated Austen and writers, like Azar Nafisi, who have written about reading Austen’s books with students.

The result is Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, a complicated hybrid of a book that mixes Cohen’s singular insight into Austen as a writer with Cohen’s personal life. The book was set to appear in May, but like so many things in the pandemic spring, it waited in the wings until July. I read Austen Years once in the dark uncertainty of early April, but realized that in order to appreciate Cohen’s book, I needed Jane Austen’s novels fresh in my mind. So I took Cohen’s project as an invitation to re-read Austen myself.

I read the novels, hoping by the time I finished them all that we would have emerged into a different world. But here we are in summer and the dying hasn’t subsided. My heart breaks for our losses, but I will spare a thought for the smart writers, like Cohen, who imagined a book in one world, spent five or ten years writing it and then saw it launched into the headwinds of our viral storm and our racial reckoning.

How do we read Jane Austen now? How do we read a book about reading Austen?

At first I thought I was meant to read Cohen’s Austen Years as one of those books that take literature as a kind of “equipment for living,” to borrow the critic Kenneth Burke’s famous phrase. A life-changing year spent reading Proust or following Dante or wrestling with D.H. Lawrence. William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (2011) is a good example of the genre. Reading Austen, Deresiewicz, a callow graduate student, learned to be a better man, a better lover and a more tolerant friend.

But Austen Years is a different and much better sort of book. Cohen doesn’t want to show us the ways Austen taught her to live or made her into some kind of better person. She has written instead about the ways the death of her father and the birth of her children (and all of the mundane things in between) taught her to read Austen.

Austen’s life was brief but her imagination was large. She was born in 1775, the second daughter and seventh child of a country clergyman. Hers was a warm-hearted middle-class family, but buffeted by the economic uncertainties of a clergyman’s fortunes. She died in 1817, just shy of her 42nd birthday.

Cohen grew up a “lonely reading child” in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father taught organizational behavior at the university and her mother directed plays. At seventeen, she tells us, she packed her bags and headed off by herself to Harvard. She made friends, graduated, became a writer and teacher, had lovers, went through analysis, and lost her father.

Now in her early 40s, Cohen has reached the allotted span of Austen’s years.

The book’s ten chapters offer an artful mix of Cohen’s life, Austen’s life, the lives of Austen’s characters, and the insights of writers and critics who, in the two centuries since Austen’s books appeared, have uncovered the riches of her novels. Cohen reminds us that writer Edward Said spawned a generation of critics who have used Austen’s novels to discuss the power relations of the 18th- century British world. We have learned to see her fictional worlds roiled by revolution and war, by the traffic in human beings and the profits of empire. Events that seemed to be on the margins of Austen’s novels have become central to how we read her.

Cohen acknowledges these insights, but turns her reading to personal events. Grieving for her father, Cohen notices that Austen’s novels often begin with characters mourning a father or mother who has died before a story begins. Grief, Cohen as understands it, runs as an undercurrent through the novels. .

She is especially drawn to Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel. “Anne Elliot, I love,” Cohen writes. “She is retiring, and people pain her, but she also finds them so funny. She is a mourner, and has two close friends, both also in mourning. Nearly everyone in her book is in mourning, in different ways.” Like Anne Elliot, Cohen mourns, laughs and walks with friends. Like Austen’s characters she reads and writes, rereads and revises, forgets and remembers.

Like millions of readers, Cohen relishes Elizabeth Bennet, but with two small children, she reads Pride and Prejudice with its irresistibly propulsive plot as a meditation on time “There were days that seemed nothing but interruption, nothing but one minute task breaking apart within another.”

Cohen’s father, Michael, and Jane Austen reside in those interruptions. For Cohen reading Austen’s novels becomes a means to extend the conversations she had with her father, an excuse to unpack a box of notes he had left her, to reread the letters he had written her over the years. Michael Cohen haunts Austen Years but for me he remains a ghostly presence.

As a memoir, Austen Years has a guarded feel that can hold a reader at arm’s length. No doubt, it’s challenging to give characters enough heft to settle them into the minds of strangers without violating their privacy. Along these lines, Cohen has made some quirky choices, referring to her children by their initials, for example. Read the dedication and you can give them names.

Set aside the reserved tone of the memoir. Cohen’s Austen Years offers us a moving and intelligent guide to reading Austen in our days of death. “Jane Austen did not forget that her books would be read in rooms where babies had just been born, and where parents had breathed their last. In this rare period of my life, drawing to a close now, where I lived only in rooms of the recently born and the recently dead, she was a companion in thought. At last I read her less. The children are growing, my father is years dead, and I turn toward other things.”

In the dark spring of 2020, Cohen turned me back toward Austen. I’m glad she did.

Ann Fabian is Distinguished Professor of History, emeritus, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey