Are you ready to reread Austen's novels? You'll want to read them again with new insights gained from Elaine Bander's new book. Bander has nurtured our love of Jane Austen for many years as a favorite presenter at Jane Austen events. In this exciting new book, she shows us modern readers how Austen's novels spoke to her contemporaries. Austen could assume her readers were more or less awash in the common novel-reading experience of her time, and wrote her works against this rich background. She set up her readers to expect the accepted formula, then transformed their reading experiences as she deliberately confounded those expectations. While we can learn a lot about those other authors here, Bander focuses more on how Austen's works engage with a few representative genres and sources, showing where Austen deliberately encourages the reader to question norms, and where she shares her firm moral foundation. Scholars and fans alike will enjoy this book. Bucknell University Press. 2026. Paper. NEW. $26.00