Name: Colleen's review of Jane Austen's Guide to Life by Lori Smith
Item: Jane Austen's Guide to Life
Rating: 3
Author: Colleen

Lori Smith

Jane Austen has become our patron saint of romance, our goddess of happy endings. Her name is synonymous with romantic sighs, period costumes, and the ideal of what love should be. But if she could give us advice about life and love, what would she tell us? What would she make of Match.com, of our Real Housewives, or of our obsession with finding The One? Austen’s stories give us relationship advice that still works today, but her life offers us so much more wisdom than just that pertaining to love. In our fame-obsessed culture, it’s refreshing to think that Austen preferred to remain anonymous. Ironically, Jane Austen—master of love stories—never married and can teach us something about being single. She also endured many painful circumstances and managed them with grace and humor. In this light biography and guide, author Lori Smith surmises about Austen’s sensible advice for twenty-first-century women—on everything from living our dreams, being a woman of substance, finding a good man, managing money, and much more. As such an astute student of human nature, Austen can teach us an awful lot about ourselves and about what it means to live well.

Thoughtful Lessons for the Modern Woman

Jane Austen's Guide to Life

Colleen

Jane Austen's Guide to Life is a short collection of advise based on Jane Austen's books and personal letters. This was a light, easy read although it was not as good as I was hoping. It is the sort of thing I would have eaten up at age fifteen or sixteen, but now it felt somewhat feeble. The advise was good but generic.

As an Austen fan myself, I understand how growing up on those books leads one to feel a degree of ownership over the characters and Austen herself. You feel like you know her and by extension what she would think of certain things. The advise in this book was very much the author's interpretation of what Austen would tell us if she were alive. Some of the notions had much stronger arguments that others. But it comes down to Smith's theories of Austen's opinions since there is no way to verify it. While Smith clearly put in a lot of research, at times it felt more like she was discussing her BFF Jane than a supportable argument. For instance, the author's premise that because Austen loved studying people's follies that she would LOVE reality TV seemed very far fetched. There were also several places that were pure supposition. I don't think that talking about how her father PROBABLY gave Austen her writing desk or how her brothers PROBABLY let her have small roles in their plays added anything to the book. Overall, it was a nice collection of general coming of age advise for young women.

I would recommend this for young women who are big fans of Jane Austen. I would not recommend it if you aren't a dedicated Austen fan or if you haven't read all Austen's works because there are a lot of spoilers. Overall, the strongest thing I got out of it was an urge to reread Austen's books (which I was due to do anyway)!

Colleen &
Jane Austen's Guide to Life by Lori Smith

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Colleen &Jane Austen's Guide to Life by Lori Smith

Reviews

Join the club

Colleen &
Jane Austen's Guide to Life by Lori Smith