Jane Austen's Guide to Good Manners--Josephine Ross

Book Review

Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades, and Horrible Blunders

By Josephine Ross

Illustrated by Henrietta Webb

ISBN: 978-1-59691-274-8

Ross’s book is delightful, easy reading to any devotee of Jane Austen’s works. It’s illuminating for today’s modern age to better understand the guiding principles of Regency society. In addition, the book has Webb’s beautiful illustrations.

The main premise of the book can be summarized in this quote: “This little guide is the outcome, ultimately, of a correspondence between the Authoress” as Ross refers to Austen “and her eldest niece—Anna Austen, or Steventon Rectory. . .” (1).

The Polite Society of the Regency may have seen manners as primarily a way to distinguish rank and establish superiority. For Jane Austen, and many other of the ton, it was also a way to put others at ease, to preserve everyone’s dignity and avoid a “selfish disdain for the feelings of others.”

The book is laid out in eight chapters, each focusing on a type of behavior: manners, introductions, conversation, dancing, dress, matrimony, the family, and servants. Within each chapter, Ross lists a series of rules followed by examples from Austen’s life and her characters. Ross has a gift for using precise examples from all of Austen’s novels and many of her characters. Throughout the book are lovely quotes from those character.

For example, to illustrate the rules for surrounding compliments, Ross writes the following exchange.

To question—or even compliment—anyone else, in person, on the details of dress may be regarded as impertinent.

Miss Steele’s scrutinies of Marianne Dashwood’s toilette are the height of bad manners, ranging from ‘the price of every part’ of her dress to ‘the number of her gowns,’ and concluding with an examination into the value and make of her gown, the colour of her shoes, and the arrangement of her hair.'

I found this book insightful and charming.

5 stars