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On this day in 1814. . .

Seventy-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. “Write what you know,” aspiring authors are counseled in...

Sale in Aisle A

Attention, bargain hunters! Five years ago, you would have needed £9 million (about $11 million) to buy Luckington Court, the Cotswolds...

Still talking

It’s never a bad time to talk about Persuasion–really, what are you doing that’s more important?--but right now may be an especially good...

Family letters

As we Janeites know to our sorrow, only 160 of Jane Austen’s letters survive, and some of those are filled with details that mean little...

A surfeit of sequels

Jane Austen never wrote a sequel. Among her many excellent qualities was a sure sense of when to leave well enough alone. Alas, too many...

As seen by AI

Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and...

In the stars

Jane Austen was a Sagittarius. Would she have cared? Or, as a clergyman’s daughter and a pious Anglican, would she have rejected the...

Cue the wine and cheese

Last spring, as blog readers will recall, the London Times announced that Persuasion was the sixth most popular book on TikTok, the...

Something to talk about

Google the Omniscient doesn’t seem to know if it was Henry Ford, P.T. Barnum, or somebody else entirely who first declared, “I don’t care...

In praise of repression

Early on in Netflix’s polarizing new adaptation of Persuasion, Anne Elliot leafs through a scrapbook in which she has preserved accounts...

On this day(ish) in 1814. . .

Seventy-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The letter-writing culture of Jane Austen’s day was...

Janeites in conversation

“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do,” Miss Bates exults in chapter 21 of Emma. In context, she is...