A prince that Jane Austen despised was one of her first readers, the New York Times reports: “This month a graduate student working in the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle came across a previously unknown 1811 bill of sale from a London bookseller, charging the Prince Regent 15 shillings for a copy of Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first novel. Oddly, the transaction took place two days before the book’s first public advertisement — making it what scholars believe to be the first documented sale of an Austen book.”
Michael Dirda recommends Wilkie Collins’s detective novel The Moonstone: “Published 150 years ago on July 16, 1868, in three volumes by Tinsley Brothers of London, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone has been called, by T.S. Eliot no less, ‘the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels.’ But is it, in fact, the best? While I could argue for the greater merits of, say, Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles or Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I wouldn’t do so with a whole lot of passion or conviction. The Moonstone is brilliantly constructed—no one can match Collins (1824-1889) for an intricately orchestrated plot—and perfect for a long summer holiday. Still, to enjoy it fully, you need to surrender to a slower narrative rhythm than you might be used to.”
