Jane Austen Gifts for the Friend Who's Read It Eleven Times
She owns the novels several times over. Here is what to give the devoted Austen re-reader instead.
(She owns the novels. Several times over. This is what to give her instead.)
Everyone has one. The friend who, when you mention you've finally started Pride and Prejudice, goes very still and asks which edition. She has read it eleven times and can tell you what she was doing for each. She does not need another copy of the book. She needs, if anything, to be gently encouraged outside. What she will accept instead is a gift that proves you understand the affliction.
That is the whole trouble with buying for a devoted Austen reader: she already owns the actual novels, usually in a quantity that worries visitors. So the gift has to come at Jane sideways, through the things around the reading rather than the reading itself. Here is what I would give her. And, because it seems only fair to ask, here is roughly what I suspect Jane herself would make of each, given that she never saw a penny of royalties and had firm opinions about absolutely everything.
1. The thousand-piece afternoon
The World of Jane Austen, 1000-Piece Jigsaw
A thousand pieces is a serious undertaking, which is precisely the point. Somewhere between Boxing Day and the return to work there is a flat grey stretch of afternoon that the jigsaw was invented to fill, and this one hides sixty characters and great houses in its scene, so she gets to feel quietly triumphant spotting Pemberley while everyone else is still hunting for the edges. Jane, who built entire novels on who was standing where at which party, would thoroughly approve of the surveillance.
2. The mug that does the talking
Penguin Pride and Prejudice Mug
There is a certain rightness to drinking your tea out of the book you are deliberately reading slowly so it won't end. This is the orange Penguin Classics cover, the one everybody recognises, put on a mug. It says what it needs to from clear across a room, which is roughly: I have read this, I intend to again, and please do not speak to me until it is gone.
3. An afternoon on a hoop
Embroider the World of Jane Austen, Craft Kit
It arrives with the hoop, the threads and the fabric, and sends her off to stitch scenes from the novels while, one assumes, listening to the audiobooks of the same novels. A closed loop of pure contentment. For the reader who likes her hands busy and her television firmly historical, this is an afternoon she will thank you for, quietly, without once looking up.
4. What Jane would say
What Would Jane Say? Wit and Wisdom from Jane Austen
Here is the little item that started the whole question. A standing flip book of Austen's sharpest lines, one to a page, made to sit on a desk and be turned to whenever the day calls for an arch remark and you simply haven't the energy to supply one yourself. Two centuries on she is still the best in the room at this. The honest answer to what Jane would say about most things is, of course, something a great deal cleverer and more cutting than you saw coming, delivered with a smile.
5. A pouch with a postcode
The Pemberley Pouch
Small, printed with a Regency crowd going cheerfully about their business beneath the word Pemberley and the date 1813, the year Pride and Prejudice first appeared and rearranged what a certain kind of reader wanted from a rainy day and a window seat. It holds the usual things a pouch holds, and announces, to anyone paying the slightest attention, exactly where its owner would choose to live if the choice were ever offered.
6. Bluebells for the ear
Bluebell Drop Earrings
Not overtly Austen at all, which is exactly why they work. A pair of small bluebells at the ear, the sort of quiet walked-in-a-wood English prettiness that belongs to the world of the novels without announcing a single character's name. For the reader who loves the books deeply but would really rather not go about dressed as them.
7. The twelfth copy
Pride and Prejudice Ceramic Book Vase
Yes, after all that, it is another copy of the book — but a loophole copy. This one is white ceramic, climbing with florals, the title on the spine and a peacock strutting at the foot of the cover in a nod, deliberate or otherwise, to the celebrated Peacock Edition of 1894, which she will spot from across the room. It slots onto the shelf beside the other eleven and does the one thing none of them can, which is hold flowers. Jane, whose most famous plot turns on the small print of an inheritance, would have a certain professional respect for the loophole.
What Jane would keep
As for what Jane would make of all this, her name on a mug and her world tipped out across a thousand pieces of cardboard, I suspect she would raise one eyebrow, observe drily that the royalty arrangement has arrived rather late, and then quietly pocket the earrings.
She understood better than anyone that the things we gather around ourselves are a way of saying who we are, who we would like to be and, occasionally, who we would like to marry. A good Austen gift does exactly the same. It says: I know you, I know what you love, and I have not bought you another copy of the book.
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I would genuinely give a treasured re-reader house room to keep.
📌 Pin this for later — the Austen birthday, Christmas, or the next time someone asks "have you read it?" for the eleventh time. Be ready.
