Austen studies for the last few decades have often been concerned with Jane Austen's place in history. A book called The Hidden Jane Austen might well belong to this genre, since exploring the historical circumstances and written sources to which Austen's work may refer can certainly throw light on previously missed or misunderstood aspects of her novels. No one writing seriously now about Austen can ignore this historicist approach or its very fruitful results, but on the whole this volume belongs to another genre. It seeks – as far as possible – to read Jane Austen as our contemporary, and so to offer new readings of the novels to some extent inspired by twenty-first-century preoccupations, while keeping closely attentive to her texts.

The topic of attention in fact is central to this book in two ways. I'm going to suggest that it is a key issue for Austen readers because in all of her published novels the heroine's attention or inattention is coupled with and sometimes played against our own engagement. Memory, which is dependent on attention in the first place, is just as important a feature. This book seeks to explore how attention and memory are dramatised, but at the same time to illuminate the reading experience of attention, and often to distinguish between reading and re-reading, as well as practising careful attention itself. The heroines are treated as psychological realities because I believe that imagining characters as actual beings is the primary, natural act of reading the realist novel, and that re-reading is a poor thing if this is lost sight of.