One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020 'A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another.' --The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice) 'An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again.' --Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live 'About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author.' In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and