Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that 'we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be'. Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how - for over half a century - Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life. Part personal memoir, part expert interaction with all the letters, manuscripts and published novels, Janet Todd's book reveals what living with Jane Austen has meant to her and what it might also mean to others. Todd celebrates the undimmable power of Austen's work to help us understand our own bodies and our environment, and teach us about patience, humour, beauty and the meaning of home.

‘Intimate, knowledgeable and frequently unexpected, this is a book for all Jane Austen's readers by one of the very best of those readers.'

Richard Cronin - Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Glasgow

‘Sharing a mind is as exciting as sharing a bed. In this gentle, witty, semi-memoir, Janet Todd reveals her eccentric encounters with books and shows us why the novels of Jane Austen should matter to all of us now.’

Miriam Margolyes

‘This is a book for all Jane Austen’s readers by one of the very best of those readers.’

Richard Cronin - author of Byron’s Don Juan: The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century

‘Jan Todd invents a new genre, part memoir, part literary criticism, to tell the captivating story of a life of reading. Benefiting from extensive study of Jane Austen and her world, Janet Todd shows us how to live with Austen’s novels, to read them and reread them and weave them into the texture of our lives. Witty and inviting, this book offers both a fresh perspective on Austen and a moving record of the struggles of feminist scholarship in the academy.’

Maud Ellmann - author of The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud

‘A timely, moving and masterful book by one of the English-speaking world’s foremost literary historians and a trailblazing scholar-heroine in Jane Austen studies.’

Devoney Looser - author of The Making of Jane Austen