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

Contact

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