Book Review: “Not Just Jane” by Shelley Dewees
My wife picked this up a few years ago, we both read it with great enjoyment, and I decided this year to go back and read it again because I wanted to do another review of it and I wanted to add some older classics to my reading list.
Not Just Jane is an examination of seven women who wrote in the same era as Jane Austen and achieved significant success, though they have largely been forgotten by many today. This is a real shame for a number of reasons, not least because they wrote some excellent stories which deserve to be remembered and read.
These are the ancestors of today's fiction and fantasy, for readers that means they are a chance to enjoy tropes and devices fresh and raw, and for those readers who are authors, it is a chance to see how some of those tropes and devices have changed and developed, or remained steadfast even over hundreds of years. Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion: A Fairy Tale (added to my TBR) is considered the first fairytale composed in English. Catherine Crowe’s The Story of Lilly Dawson begins with the young protagonist surviving a shipwreck, only to be captured by pirates, and promises to be a tale of family secrets, plots, and mysteries.
There are dozens more books discussed in this little volume, and I think you could easily turn this short book into a full college course or its equivalent. These women are fascinating, and they lived fascinating lives as they struggled to find their place in a world that was often not designed to encourage or facilitate their gifts.
I take encouragement from these stories because I think we all have challenges and things we face as we try to achieve our hopes and dreams, and it is inspiring to see how others have faced what are often far greater challenges, and persevered.
I also think it is important to read widely, and by that I mean a couple of things. I do not mean you should not have your favorite genres, tropes, etc. On the contrary, I think that’s both healthy and important. One benefit of reading is that it can provide healing, escape, and relief, and it is to my mind a great tragedy that so many people have been trained to see reading as a chore.
But reading beyond your favorite niche can be rewarding, and not just because you may find new things that you like. It can increase your appreciation for your favorites as you see where they came from, it can show you how different people have told the same story in different ways, and it can show you how others have thought about the same struggles that we often wrestle with today.
If I may theorize for a moment, I believe humans learn through experience. Sometimes that experience is personal and lived, which is both the most impactful and most difficult type. But we can experience things through stories as well, and that is how stories can change us.
Through stories, I can get a glimpse of how people very different from myself, living in very different times from myself, lived, thought, and struggled. Sometimes those struggles are recognizable, and I can see how others have approached those struggles from new or different perspectives, giving me new ways of fighting my own battles. At other times, those struggles are utterly foreign to me, but give me a way of relating to and understanding those around me.
It can be frightening sometimes to see just how narrow our viewpoints are, and how little we understand those around us, even our closest friends, but stories can give us a way to broaden our view, just a little, if we let them.
If you’re looking to read something a little older, or at least learn a bit more about some of the famous authors from earlier times, I highly recommend this book. This is one of those that is a bit like a college survey course, where you hit the big points of a wide field of study so that you can understand the big picture before diving into the depths, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Even if you don’t decide to go and read some of the older works by the women mentioned here, just having a little awareness of them, of how they wrote, and of how they shaped the history of the English novel, is well worth the short amount of time it will take to read this book.
If this book sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to help support me, you can check it out via the amazon affiliate link below. It’s no extra cost to you, and I get a small advertising fee from Amazon for helping you find a new book.
