Julia Yost is senior editor of First Things. She holds an M.A. in English from Yale and an M.F.A. in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Her essays on literature and culture appear in First Things, COMPACT, and the New York Times. She lives in New York City with her husband and four sons.
forthcoming
Jane Austen’s Darkness
Wiseblood Books, September 2024
“Three or four families in a country village,” wrote Jane Austen to a niece, “is the very thing to work on.” This message from “Aunt Jane” is often thought to define the breadth and depth of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and her other novels. But does the sun always shine on a country village? Julia Yost looks on the dark side of Austen: the marriages that will not be happy, the heroes who are not heroic, a society that elevates the mediocre at the expense of the meritorious. And there is the shadow of mortality, darker with every novel until the author’s death at forty-one. Yost reads Austen’s six major novels and her unfinished last manuscript to show how she turned her protest into art.
“A must-read for Austen devotees.”
—R. R. Reno, editor, First Things
“Yost’s retelling of Austen’s heart of darkness gives us a story of moral bankruptcy and collapse, with Austen herself as a spiritual ascetic. Yost’s Austen comes not to praise English marriage and society, but to bury them.”
—James Matthew Wilson, Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston
essays and reviews
“The Return of Recovered Memory”
COMPACT, June 3, 2022
A pernicious theory, debunked in the 1990s, makes a comeback in American intellectual culture and therapeutic practice.
“New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church”
The New York Times, August 9, 2022
A look at the micro-trend of Catholic conversions in Manhattan’s post-pandemic downtown scene.
“Austen’s Darkness”
COMPACT, August 24, 2023
“Ours is rather a dark staircase,” warns Miss Bates in Emma. She knows what hazards may befall you on your way up or (especially) down.
“Leave Them Kids Alone”
First Things, March 2024
Toughening up our kids may begin with admitting that we can love them without always liking them all that much. A review of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy (Sentinel, 2024).
“By Our Wounds We Are Healed”
First Things, October 2021
The pseudoscience of “body memories” reveals the salience of conceits of trauma in American culture. A review of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (Penguin, 2014).
“Spirituality of the Suburbs”
First Things, October 2019
What would Jesus do? See a therapist. A reflection on the late novelist Toni Morrison.
“America’s Fat Knight”
First Things, December 2019
The death of Falstaff reveals that for the old to be cast off by the young they have mentored is the death of them. A reflection on the late critic Harold Bloom.
“A Paper Church”
First Things, November 2019
John Henry Newman saw that papalism pushed too far dictates piety to the pope at the expense of the tradition he stewards.