Campaign for the American Reader: Six books that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the

History Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Romney is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Romeny's new books is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend .

At Lit Hub she tagged six books that "owe a debt to Austen’s work" by authors who "teased out threads from Austen in order to make something peculiarly their own." One title on the list:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Part of Austen’s modern appeal—the reason she is one of the most commonly read “classic” authors—is because her work pleases readers across today’s fractured genre landscape. Austen has a devoted following among romance readers. She also attracts admirers who don’t read romance at all.

Often cited as one of the greatest English novels of the past one hundred years, Atonement pulls inspiration primarily from Northanger Abbey. In both novels, a young girl’s literary turn of mind exacerbates her naive errors, complicating our conceptions of imagination and reality, dreaming and consequences. In an interview about Atonement, Ian McEwan made clear his debt to her: “The ghost that stalks this novel is that of Jane Austen.”