The story of Jane Austen is a familiar one for many scholars and critics. In fact, as Devoney Looser claims, "She was not born, but rather became, Jane Austen" (The Making of Jane Austen [2017] 1). In exploring just how and by whom this legacy was formed, Freya Johnston reminds us that the author called "Jane Austen" has been variously shaped by her family, her readers, and, most especially, by critics and scholars.

According to Johnston, the facts of Austen's publication record do not support the story that has long been told about her as an artist. This story follows the standard script for great writers, "progress[ing] in a straight line from immaturity to maturity" (1). Such a path carries an expectation of refinement, a movement towards true authorship unavailable to young writers, who must get their prattling out of the way in order to hone their genius. Early writings are thus either treated as "trifles" or cast as precursors to the greater works to come (16).

Johnston finds, however, that the echoes between Austen's early and later works resist any clear demarcations. With a nod to the work of critics such as Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, she argues that Austen "preserved, returned to, and revised" her early, unpublished writing before and during the time she wrote for publication (1). Categorizing her full-length fictional work solely according to the dates of publication also ignores the actual dates of composition, often much earlier--and it sidesteps the thematic and stylistic parallels of her later works to Austen's earlier writings (1). "If we recognize that, far from completing one piece of fiction and then moving on to the next, Austen must often have been occupied with two or three novels in varying states and working on them alongside one another, it may help to elicit another aspect of her fiction. Her novels are dramas of adjacency, simultaneity, displacement, and substitution" (60).

Reassessing the role of Austen's early works is crucial to reframing the typical narrative of Austen's literary career. For those unfamiliar with Austen's earlier juvenilia, Johnston presents them as part of a cohesive oeuvre. Consisting of twenty-seven separate pieces compiled in three stationer's notebooks, her juvenilia "contain later revisions and corrections," testifying to the processes of "authorial re-reading" and re-working that define Austen's career from beginning to end (2). That scholars have only just begun to pay serious attention to Austen's juvenilia is not surprising: they were not published until more than thirty years after her death, received "apologetic," "cautionary," and "disparaging" reviews (10-11) at the time, and were not fully compiled until the twentieth century. Given these misevaluations, it is not hard to see why accounts of her life as an author have tended to follow one script.

Johnston raises questions designed to generate a new narrative in place of the old familiar script. For instance, how does a writer's method of composition affect her legacy? Should Austen's revision style inform how we view her life and her work? What is the value of her early works, or works unpublished in her lifetime? Had she lived longer and published more, would her career be understood differently? By conducting thought experiments throughout her chapters, Johnson dismantles the firm divisions often made between Austen's juvenilia and major works. For instance, Northanger Abbey was composed from 1798-1803, but not published until 1817, "obscur[ing] its proximity to the unpublished juvenilia" (91). Johnson notes the similarity between Catherine Morland and the heroine of "Kitty, or the Bower," found in the third volume of Austen's early writings, and also between Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, composed in 1815 and published in 1816. "All this perhaps serves only to show that arguments can be made for thinking of Austen's early work as late, her late work as early, and at the same time" (95).

Drawing on annotations, published novels, letters, and deathbed writings, Johnston's separate chapters deal variously with Austen as a teenage writer, a reader, and a historian. Much of Austen's writing, juvenilia included, works as "a form of backchat with earlier writers and genres," sometimes directly and more often through the opinions of her characters (110). Yet Austen's plots feature constantly changing opinions, false first impressions, and mistaken assumptions, making her own views difficult to pin down at any one time. Against Henry Austen's claim that "Every thing came finished from her pen" (J.E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections [2002] 141), Johnston asserts that "we would not expect someone who rarely changed her mind to return to her early and late texts and alter them as frequently as Austen seems ... to have done" (113). Johnston asks whether Austen's final work--a poem on the Winchester Races--might "be returning to the atmosphere of her earliest writings, in which characters who behave badly ... are repeatedly let off the hook" (141). Indeed, Johnston recognizes the importance of questioning as a means of doing critical work. Her unspoken critique is that too much has been assumed, and not enough has been contested, in the history of Austen scholarship. Any attempts to craft a linear trajectory from Austen's career are, at best, heavy-handed and, at worst--manipulative.

Johnston does still rely upon assumptions--though of a different sort--about the kind of artist that Austen was, compiling evidence to assert that her work stays consistent with regard to her impressions on people and the world around her: in this, her methodology remains consistent with the wide body of extant scholarship declaring the opposite. Her evidence is highly compelling, however, particularly for new Austen scholars who may feel as though others have left no stone unturned. A great strength of the book lies is its retracing of how Austen's reception--and critical history--have contributed to a "restrictive reading" of her novels, her career, and her very person (51). Now may be just the time to un-make one "Jane Austen" in favor of new narratives.

Taya Sazama is a PhD candidate at the University of South Dakota.