STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's a big year for Jane Austen fans. This year is the 250th anniversary of her birth in 1775. Jane Austen's famous novels were influenced by her reading of Shakespeare and Milton and also some women, who are featured in a new book called "Jane Austen's Bookshelf." This book comes from Rebecca Romney, who is a rare book dealer in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her bookshop sounds like a place worth visiting, so MORNING EDITION's books editor Adriana Gallardo did.
ADRIANA GALLARDO, BYLINE: Hi.
EMBRY CLARK: Hi, guys. Did you find the place OK?
GALLARDO: Yeah.
REBECCA ROMNEY: Yeah, it's not exactly a traditional bookshop, but it does have a cozy bookshop feel, I hope, when you come in.
GALLARDO: Rebecca Romney likes to pause every few steps in the aisles of her bookshop, Type Punch Matrix...
ROMNEY: So this book here...
GALLARDO: ...To admire her literary treasures.
ROMNEY: Let's see where it is. You feel that? You feel how it's like almost linen-y (ph)?
GALLARDO: Yeah.
ROMNEY: It's much softer. It has got a little bit of scratchiness to it, but it feels almost closer to fabric than it does to modern paper.
GALLARDO: As a collector, it's not just about the storylines. Like a museum docent, she revels in the details of her rare books, some dating as far back as the 16th century. But a few years ago, one book took a hold of her.
Wait. Is this the "Evelina" book? Oh.
ROMNEY: This is the "Evelina," yes. This is the book that started it at all.
GALLARDO: OK.
That's British novelist, Frances Burney's 1778 novel, "Evelina." In it, Burney's muse navigates the complexities of 18th century high society with wit and a satirical flare. Romney, a scholar of novels, knew of the text, but soon she realized that there was much more to know about its author.
ROMNEY: Her book "Cecilia" is probably where Austen got the phrase pride and prejudice. How did I not know that? If Austen loved her, why don't we still read her today? Would Austen really have such terrible taste? Is this a bad book? And then I read the book, and I thought, no, actually, this is a great book. So now the question becomes, why don't we read this great book anymore? And that was the beginning of the book.
GALLARDO: In "Jane Austen's Bookshelf," Romney's new book, she spotlights eight women writers who were contemporaries of Austen, including Charlotte Lennox and Maria Edgeworth.
ROMNEY: Most of them I haven't even heard of. And then when I researched a little bit further, I realized scholars see it this way, too, because these women were so systematically excised from our understanding of the canon and the development of the novel that they gave it a name. And that name is the great forgetting.
GALLARDO: Once Romney went searching for clues to better understand who these women were, a whole new set of connections emerged.
ROMNEY: Then you start seeing this interaction between the authors, which I think was so fun. It wasn't just everything about Austen. Soon, it just becomes its own constellation of writers in the 18th century and specifically how women are talking to each other in the 18th century as artists.
GALLARDO: As she scans the titles that inspired her book...
ROMNEY: What else do we have here?
GALLARDO: ...Romney's keen to point out that at the end of her quest, what she wrote is as much a literary altar as it is a book.
ROMNEY: Both the book and the collection become this eulogy for these authors, because what I'm trying to do is not only get a sense of what their accomplishments were as writers, but also to give them their due - give them the due that has been taken from them over the hundreds of years in which their reputations have slowly trickled away.
GALLARDO: Adriana Gallardo, NPR News.
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