Jane Austen in Scarsdale - by Paula Marantz Cohen (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Anne Ehrlich is a dedicated guidance counselor steering her high-school charges through the perils of college admission. Thirteen years ago, when she was graduating from Columbia University, her wealthy family---especially her dear grandmother Winnie---persuaded her to give up the love of her life, Ben Cutler, a penniless boy from Queens College. Anne has never married and hasn't seen Ben since---until his nephew turns up in her high school and starts applying to college.

Now Ben is a successful writer, a world traveler, and a soon-to-be married man; and Winnie's health is beginning to fail. All of these changes have Anne beginning to wonder...Can old love be rekindled, or are past mistakes too painful to forget?

With all the wit and perceptiveness of Jane Austen's Persuasion, Jane Austen in Scarsdale is a fresh and romantic new comedy from a novelist with "a knack for making modern life reflect literature in the most engaging manner" (Library Journal).

Review Quotes

"For every frazzled student applying to college, for all anxious parents trying to get a student into college, for all teachers besieged by requests for higher grades and glowing letters of recommendation, this book is for you. I am persuaded that Cohen, like Jane Austen, knows how to work things out for her heroine--neatly and satisfactorily. I loved it." --Ann B. Ross, author of MISS JULIA'S SCHOOL OF BEAUTY

"Paula Marantz Cohen has done it again! Jane Austen in Scarsdale is laugh-out-loud funny, literate, wise--and best of all, a satirical mirror of our times. She has become our own Jane Austen." --Diane Ravitch, author of THE LANGUAGE POLICE

About the Author

Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is the author of two previous novels, Jane Austen in Boca and Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan, and four scholarly works of nonfiction, including Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth and The Daughter as Reader: Encounters Between Literature and Life. She lives in Moorestown, New Jersey, with her husband and two children.