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Rachel Cohen

Biography

Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen is the author of A CHANCE MEETING: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, and BERNARD BERENSON: A Life in the Picture Trade, which was long-listed for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Believer and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.

Rachel Cohen

Books by Rachel Cohen

Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels
by Rachel Cohen - Memoir, Nonfiction

In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing and imagining through Austen’s novels. AUSTEN YEARS is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism and biographical and historical material about Austen herself.