J.M. Hushour's Reviews > Some Words of Jane Austen

This book is quite literally what it says in the title: a book about certain words that Jane Austen uses and how they fit into her entire oeuvre. If you're a Jane Austen devotee like me, you might find this book to be slightly superfluous, but I welcomed the chance to revisit her novels and characters and gained some slightly shifted perspectives on some of both. If you consider yourself a "sophisticated" or "learned" reader, much of what Tave writes about will have already been obvious to you. It is still a rewarding read, with an introductory chapter on Austen's purported "limitations" being the most rewarding bit. Tave argues that there is nothing confined or claustrophobic about Austen's social milieu, the setting for all of her characters, but rather Austen's genius can be defined as masterfully and creatively engaging her circumscribed social world in ways that only a truly gifted write could. Tave goes on through all of Austen's main characters, focusing on words like "sensibility", "mortify", "imagination", "exertion" and so on, to illustrate Austen's gift. Think of this as a way of imagining Austen's works as a kind of AEU, Austen Expanded Universe.