Sailing the Sea of Scholarship

I have on my desk some 70 resources on Jane Austen. I am looking for a conversation that at least 5 of the authors have with one another and it has to be the right conversation. I am lost in a sea of information where each person rides their own wave. There have been some seminal hurricanes to come through which have piqued the attention of other sailors and brought them into conversation with each other, works such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Those essays and books which make this essay their starting point make the argument that this text is truly amazing but amiss in too many very important places. They then go on to point out the ways in which their own arguments diverge in thinking and are stronger because of it. Some do this very successfully and others less so. Unfortunately, Gilbert and Gubar nor any other text I have yet to locate causes a congregating around the topic of Austen and reading.

There are quite a number of resources dealing with Austen and education, or contemporary fiction, or conduct books, or Northanger Abbey. However, even in this narrowed search where they seem to be aware of and influenced by each other's works, there is little cited directly, especially in the book length works. They often bring up similar points, take up similar arguments and yet are unwilling to show by citing that they are a part of a community of equally brilliant and thinking scholars. And perhaps these ideas and facts are self evident or so well canvased that they need not be cited or perhaps they are afraid that this would decrease the merit of their own work. But regardless it makes it difficult for me to understand if there is a conversation about Austen and reading. I have concluded that the sea of Austen is so big and their are so many diverse boats that I may float along and become lost at sea just trying to figure out where everyone is going, where they started and who they have met on the way.