What Became of Jane Austen?
Kingsley Amis
216 pages
published in 1970

This is a collection of literary essays Amis wrote for such magazines as Spectator, The New Statesman, Playboy, Sunday Telegraph and others. They were written in the late fifties, early sixties and were necessary Amis provided postscripts for this edition.

In one sense, Kingsley Amis is a fairly conservative writer and in fact in one of the essays collected here he explains why he became a Conservative: Why Lucky Jim Turned Right. In another way, he's quite liberal in his tastes: apart from pieces on such highbrow literary subjects as Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence and Dickens, there are also essays in here about detective novels, Jules Verne as father of science fiction and horror movies. Of course, Amis also wrote one of the first serious literary books of science fiction criticism New Maps of Hell.

I've always had a liking for essay and criticism writings and this is exactly the sort of collection I like: broad, interesting and well written. Being a collection of short pieces originally written for various magazines you won't find the sort of big, in depth articles Orwell has in his collection and some of the pieces are slight, but this is still worth tracking down.