My subject, like that of Mary Jacobus, is afterlives: in my case, the reception of Jane Austen in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite recent work by Devoney Looser and myself, among others, this is an area in which much remains to be discovered and determined.

My impetus for investigating William Dean Howells arose from a passing comment made by a fellow conference delegate, an Americanist, a few years ago, while I was writing Reading Austen in America. I explained that I was researching Austen's early publication and reception in North America and how Americans contributed to the rise of Austen's international fame. “Oh,” said the Americanist, “I always figured that was mostly Howells's doing.” Though my work at the time concentrated on the decades before William Dean Howells, her comment stayed with me. I realized I did not have a full conception of what Howells had written about Austen, and I went looking for the authoritative study of that subject, so that I could be well informed the next time I encountered an Americanist.

To my surprise, I found that such a study did not exist. The second volume of Brian Southam's Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage contains excerpts from a handful of Howells's publication and discussion of a few more. Mary A. Favret's essay “Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America,” in Deidre Lynch's groundbreaking collection Janeites, points out that Howells conceived of Austen as being “amazingly Emersonian and American.” Katie Halsey's reception history Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945 treats the famous back-and-forth between Mark Twain, who professed to despise Austen, and his friend Howells, who adored her. But no one, it seemed, had produced a comprehensive account of Howells and his Janeitism.

As I found when researching Reading Austen in America, American reception of British authors often represents quite a gap in scholarship, for reasons both practical and disciplinary.