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Rachel M. Brownstein

Rachel Brownstein - Professor - profile photo

Research Interests

  • 18th and 19th century literature, the novel especially; life writing; essays; caricature

Education

  • Ph.D., Yale University

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Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Brooklyn College

Publications

Books:

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  • Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. (Viking, 1982; Penguin, 1984; reprinted with a new Postscript, Columbia University Press, 1994)

  • Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (Knopf, 1993; Duke University Press, 1995).  Winner of the 1993 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association.  Listed as one of the Notable Books of 1993 by NYTBR.

  • Why Jane Austen? (Columbia University Press, 2011)

  • American Born: An Immigrant’s Story, A Daughter’s Memoir (The University of Chicago Press, 2023).

RECENT ARTICLES:

  •  “The Enduring legacy of Jane Austen,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 10, October 20, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic
  •  Chapter 9, “Jane Again,” in Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance, ed. Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim, The University of Rochester Press, 2022.
  • “Character Mongers,” in Character Mongers, or, Trading in People on Paper in the Long 18th Century,” booklet for an exhibition at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (October 10, 2016 through January 27, 2017), Yale University Press.
  • “Caricature and Character: James Gillray and Jane Austen,” Textus, 2018
  • Character and Caricature: Jane Austen and James Gillray,” Persuasions 37, 2015.
  • “Endless Imitation: Austen’s and Byron’s Juvenilia,” in The Child Writer from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press (2005).

About Professor Brownstein

Rachel M. Brownstein is an emeritus professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of four critically acclaimed books, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels; Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française; Why Jane Austen?; and American Born: An Immigrant's Story, A Daughter's Memoir. She is a graduate of Hunter College High School and Barnard College, and received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University

Rachel Brownstein - Professor - profile photo

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Brooklyn College

Books

Book cover: American Born

American Born

An Immigrant's Story, a Daughter's Memoir

by Rachel M. Brownstein Professor, English, Professor, Liberal Studies, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies

An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.

When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.” 

Published March 2023
University of Chicago Press

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Why Jane Austen?

Why Jane Austen?

by Rachel M. Brownstein Professor, English, Professor, Liberal Studies, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies

The author considers constructions of Jane Austen as a heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author and the changing notions of these categories. She finds echoes of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, the commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims paradoxically to preserve and liberate, to correct and collaborate with old Jane. Her discussion of the distinctiveness and distinction of Austen's genius clarifies the reasons why we read the novelist-or why we should read her-and reorients the prevailing view of her work. Reclaiming the rich comedy of Austen while constructing a new narrative of authorship, Brownstein unpacks the author's fascinating entanglement with readers and other admirers. 

Published June 2011
Columbia University Press

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Book cover: Tragic Muse

Tragic Muse

Rachel of the Comédie-Française

by Rachel M. Brownstein Professor, English, Professor, Liberal Studies, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies

The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores—at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history—the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image.

Published January 1995
Duke University Press Books

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Book cover: Becoming a Heroine

Becoming a Heroine

Reading about Women in Novels

by Rachel M. Brownstein Professor, English, Professor, Liberal Studies, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies

Analyzes the image of women and the theme of the choice of a husband in the classic novels by English authors, such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf

Published January 1984
Penguin Books

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