I'm happy to announce that my new book, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, was published with Johns Hopkins University Press on June 11, 2024! I finally had a full sabbatical year and time to write a book solely on Austen. It is the first full-length study of Austen's endings--both in the novels and adaptations. It is also an extended rumination on her own relationship to the marriage plot.

 

So far, it has been praised in Publishers Weekly, given a full-page review in The Sunday Times, featured in the New Yorker's "What We're Reading This Week" column, featured in the Wall Street Journal, and reviewed by Austenites such as Susannah Fullerton and Maggie Lane. Interviews about the book can be found on Austen Chat, The Austen Connection, The Flyleaf Bookstore, and The New Books Network. I will also be presenting in Southampton, New Bern, and Philadelphia for the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth in 2025.

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Sample Reviews:

Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness examines the ambivalence embedded in Jane Austen's 'happy endings,' arguing that the novelist was resisting platitudes about marriage and favoring a more discerning, individualized understanding of happiness. Brodey writes with verve and clarity and draws judiciously on Austen criticism. Her book is savvy and insightful.
―Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

This accessible and lively book quizzes the seemingly tidy happily-ever-afters of Jane Austen's stories. Brodey's smart observations slide effortlessly back and forth between Austen's era and our own. Recommended for newly enlisted Janeites as well as perennial re-readers!
―Janine Barchas, author of The Lost Books of Jane Austen

In this thoughtful and lively exploration of Austen's novels and their afterlives, Brodey is the first to investigate how the books' dismissive endings are self-conscious innovations―both artful and instructive. Brodey's nuanced readings illuminate the Janeite universe, teaching us to see a more complex (if imperfect) felicity.
―Susan Ford, editor of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line

From closely reading Jane Austen's marriage plots and their conclusions, Brodey radiates outward to consider literary antecedents, biographical contexts, and present-day adaptations. Never before have the social significances, emotional resonances, moral meanings, and philosophical underpinnings of Austen's notoriously problematic endings been so incisively explored and so convincingly explained.
―Peter W. Graham, author of Jane Austen & Charles Darwin, Naturalists and Novelists

Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness explores how her enduring novels offer both characters and readers alike far more than clichéd happy endings in marriage. By putting Austen's original plots and today's film adaptations in sparkling conversation, Brodey has given us a learned, allusive, provocative, and delightfully readable book.
―Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen

Brodey shows that Jane Austen was that rare writer: a romantic novelist without romantic illusions. This is a subtle vindication of Austen's happy endings, demonstrating the artistry and tough-mindedness with which they are arranged. Like any really good book about Austen's fiction, it is also itself a delight to read.
―John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved 

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Brodey’s interpretations of Austen’s writings are subtle and penetrating, and discussions of popular Austen film adaptations shed light on how Hollywood tramples over the novels’ ambivalence. Austenites will want to take a look. 

-- Publisher's Weekly

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Brodey…treats Austen as a moral philosopher whose form was the novel.

--Katherine Howell, National Review

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This astute treatise by an Austen scholar questions the deep association in popular culture between the beloved writer’s work and happy endings.

--The New Yorker

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Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness is not a book for hopeless romantics. . . . Deploying tough love, Brodey reminds us that our desires are the consequence of getting confused between the countless screen adaptations of Austen and the original texts.

--Kathryn Hughes, The Sunday Times

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Brodey has written one of the most stimulating commentaries on Austen's narrative methods that I've read in a long time.

--Maggie Lane, Jane Austen Society News Letter

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That Austen might be pushing her readers to separate the ideas of happiness and marriage in favor of introspection and self-actualization is a bold idea, but Ms. Brodey defends it with aplomb in this beautifully argued and original book. 

--Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal 

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It can be hard to find new things to say about Jane Austen, but this excellent critical book manages it, and makes you think again about the endings of the novels and the future happiness of the characters.

--Susannah Fullerton, President of Jane Austen Society of Australia, "Top Ten Books of 2024”

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Order:

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