About me

After a career spanning the UK’s education, health and civil services, I decided to return to research and completed my PhD in 2019. During the course of that work, I learned more about Jane Austen than I was ever going to fit into a thesis, and I was too interested in what I was learning to let it go. As a consequence, I continued my research after my doctorate was awarded, and my book - Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood: Rereading the Self - is the result of that work. Having discovered, again, paths too interesting to ignore during the process of writing my first book, I am currently working on my second.

Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood: Rereading the Self

My book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgement which propose fresh insights into Austen’s narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major coponents of selfhood theory - memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection - and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen’s narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen’s rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

Click here for more detail.

Review

“Jane Austen and Reflective Selfhood is a multi-layered and nuanced analysis that locates Austen within the Enlightenment philosophical tradition shaped by the work of Locke, Hume, and Smith. In a perceptive and timely study, Linda Charlton explores a range of topics – memory, imagination, probability, sympathy, reflection and reading – to argue that Austen’s use of moral-sense philosophy is foundational to her own style of fiction. The book benefits from Charlton’s meticulous attention to detail and careful research, remaining eminently readable and impeccably argued throughout.”

-- Anthony Mandal, Professor of Print and Digital Cultures, Cardiff University, Wales.