The Jane Austen Book Club

Recently I completed the FutureLearn course - Jane Austen: Myth, Reality and Global Celebrity. In the discussion a book that was often mentioned in the discussion list was The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

The plot involves a group of six people in California who decide to meet once a month to discuss one of Jane Austen's novels. The participants are a mixed group who we gradually meet and learn of their back stories. Bernadette is the oldest member of the group at 67, Jocelyn and Sylvia had met at a camp when they were 11, Allegra is Sylvia's daughter, Prudie is a 28 year old French teacher while the token male of the group is Grigg, aged about 40 who met Jocelyn at a hotel when she was attending a dog show and he was attending a science fiction convention.

Each month the meeting is held at the home of a book club member and although we learn of the opinions of individual members about about Jane Austen's writing, the plots of the books and the characters, much of this book is spent exploring the lives of the individual readers. Consequently, as the months go by, we learn of the complicated relationships of and between some of the book club members.

At the end of the book there is a brief summary of the plot of the six Jane Austen novels discussed at each meeting,  a collection of comments made by Jane Austen's family and friends about Mansfield Park and Emma, plus a list of chronological comments about Jane Austen's books made by critics and other writers.