A Regency Evening at Waterstones Tottenham Court Road

Join us at Waterstones TCR for a special evening celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth with acclaimed Austen scholar Devoney Looser and historian Zoë McGee. Together, they’ll delve into Austen’s enduring legacy, the fascinating world of Regency-era life, and why her work continues to captivate readers centuries later. Whether you're a lifelong fan or newly curious, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

Wild for Austen

You may have thought Jane Austen was a quiet spinster, but Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest. Tracing the author's life and legacy across 250 years, she reveals an Austen far wilder than the one we know.

Looser takes a deep dive into Austen's work, offering fresh insights into her six completed novels, as well as her juvenilia, unfinished fiction, essays, and poetry. She also reveals new information about Austen's relationship to the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage. Examining the author's legacy, she turns up extraordinary stories about ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in court, and the eclectic members of the Austen family, whose own outrageous lives are wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth and humour, and filled with remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to one of the world's most beloved novelists.

Courting disaster

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common?

More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon.

With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent. In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…

MEET THE AUTHORS!

Devoney Looser is the author or editor of ten books, including The Making of Jane Austen (2017), a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and a Guggenheim Fellow, a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She plays roller derby as 'Stone Cold Jane Austen'.

Zoë McGee has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and an MSt in Eighteenth Century Studies from the University of Oxford. She has spoken at conferences internationally and performs at very nerdy stand-up-comedy nights. She has worked as a university teacher and a bookseller.