June 4, 2025, 12:24pm

Jane is in the air lately. This year, Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice turns twenty, which is the same age Keira Knightley was when she starred as the cool girl’s Lizzy Bennet. A new feast of a French film, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, looks at all the ways the great lady may have destroyed our lives. And in other summer film news, Celine Song’s The Materialists promises to bring the P&P-influenced rom-com back in a big way.

Unlike Keira, the real Lizzy was five and twenty and fast approaching burden-to-my-parents age when Mr. Darcy swept into her life. But real fans prefer to suspend disbelief. Speaking of, here’s a few novels to add to your summer TBR pile if you’re craving an Austen-y fix.

Mariah Rahmani, Liquid: A Love Story

With its emphasis on the ruthless economic factors that affect one’s choice of mate, this debut novel scales the rom-com to late capitalist proportions. Here’s a truth universally experienced: a young scholar sets out to marry the richest man she can find. But sensibility gets in the way of good sense.

Jessie Redmon Faust, There is Confusion

I’ve become an evangelist for this book from a star in the Harlem Renaissance cosmos, lately revived by a reprint and a Morgan Jerkins introduction. Following three ambitious siblings at the turn of the twentieth century, this is a zippy drawing room tale that ventures uptown. Expect much striving, and some satirical marriage plotting. Persuasion people should take particular note.

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

Mitford’s Nancy, an upper-crust lady of eccentric parentage making her way through interwar England, is a true romantic heroine. A little dippy, she makes a few miscalculations in her pursuit of love. But a motley cast of aesthetes and Communists show up to guide the quest. This novel, the first in a trilogy, pokes gentle fun at the aristocrat and all her unruly impulses. For Emma fans.

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory

This forthcoming-this-summer novel is a gleefully constructed diagram of several affairs. Written in the form of an MFA thesis, the book offers a postmodern dissection of the ways power affects coupling partnerships. There’s an entanglement involving professors, graduate students, and department leaders that ends in a true Edwardian muddle. Extremely fun and incredibly itchy.

Patricia Park, Re: Jane

This 2016 novel is technically an homage to another classic—Bronte’s Jane Eyre. But Park has a knack for echoing mannered 19th century conundrums. When this Jane, of Queens—an orphaned, hapa student of nunchi—accepts an au pair position with English professors, her world begins to open up in unexpected ways. A coming into self story befitting our time.

Lily King, The English Teacher

I’ve been on a Lily King completist mission. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this un-flashy architect miss. This early novel follows a mother and son whose lives are thrown into chaos when mom accepts a marriage proposal from a mysterious widower. Like Re: Jane, this book pays homage to another classic: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In that old fashion, the novel’s concerned with trauma, the compromises we make to pursue safety, and the joys of a life spent in letters.

Larry McMurtry, Terms of Endearment

McMurtry is best known for writing like a cowboy. But friends said he gossiped like Jane Austen.

Here, the inimitable matriarch Aurora Greenway’s suitors circle, clueless as Emma Woodhouse’s. And the failure of her daughter’s marriage is in part a class casualty. Emma’s man is a bit like Mr. Wickham, grifting his way around the periphery of academia as that sordid lieutenant did the British army.

But best of all here is the vexed mother/daughter relationship, which can echo Lizzy’s terms with her own mother. Watch two women with totally different value systems attempt to communicate, and see the bittersweet fallout.