June - 2018

Journalist and author

Blog

Bringing up the rear

Jun 28, 2018

Bringing up the rear

Six months ago, author and scholar Sarah Emsley launched a blog series dedicated to the two Austen novels marking their bicentenary this year: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published by Austen’s family a few months after her untimely death in July 1817. * This project was Sarah’s follow-up to blog series she curated on Mansfield Park and Emma, as well as a shorter series she wrote herself on Pride and Prejudice, to mark the bicentenaries of those three books. (Unfortunatel

Graphing the plot

Jun 25, 2018

Graphing the plot

Back in high school, I did reasonably well in math. I may have trouble balancing my checkbook these days, but I promise I’m not one of those math-o-phobes who thinks numbers are the work of the devil. Still, at the risk of sounding like a STEM Philistine, I can’t help but scratch my head at what seems to me to be the sheer pointlessness of a math-enhanced literary analysis spotlighted last month by the BBC. Many years ago, apparently, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut concocted an a

A statue for Chawton

Jun 21, 2018

A statue for Chawton

The Hampshire village of Chawton is the mecca of the Janeite faith: the community where Austen spent the last eight years of her life, the secure home where she wrote or revised all six of her completed novels, the place from which “all her works were sent into the world,” to quote the plaque outside her cottage. So it’s understandable that at least one villager found himself a tad miffed when the world’s first statue of Austen was unveiled last summer in . . . the nearby mar

Ready for its closeups

Jun 18, 2018

Ready for its closeups

A couple of months ago, when Jane Austen’s House Museum unveiled the results of the collaborative quilting project it organized to commemorate the 2017 bicentennial of Austen’s death, I bemoaned the lack of close-up photos for those of us who couldn’t journey to England to view the quilt squares in person. I’m happy to say that omission has now been rectified: All fifty-three panels in the Jane Austen Community Story Quilt are now viewable in three online galleries, along wit

Still missing

Jun 14, 2018

Still missing

In the annals of news-that-isn’t-exactly-new, the year 1975 holds a special place. That fall, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lapsed into a coma. For nearly three weeks, the evening newscasts featured stories about Franco’s lingering, along the lines of “Francisco Franco is still clinging to life,” before he finally died on November 20 at the age of eighty-two. Then Saturday Night Live got into the act: For weeks afterwards -- months? Years? -- its parody newscast would

On this day in 1799. . .

Jun 11, 2018

On this day in 1799. . .

Thirty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The story of Jane Austen fandom has been told more than once, in books by Claire Harman, Claudia L. Johnson, Devoney Looser, Deidre Lynch (as editor), and (ahem!) myself. Austen devotees have been located among those who read her novels soon after their publication in 1813-17, among those who first devoured her nephew’s hagiographic 1869 memoir, and among those who swooned over Colin-Firth-in-a-wet-

Inspiring Janeite PR

Jun 7, 2018

Inspiring Janeite PR

As a fan of not only Jane Austen but also the Jane Austen Society of North America (member since 1981), I was pleased to see JASNA pop up in an unexpected context recently: as a practitioner of exemplary PR. “Most recently, I joined the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and have reveled in the refinement of its messaging,” Janeite Laura Hale Brockway, a writer and editor from Texas, recently noted in the online newsletter PR Daily. “In a world of fake news, spam, a

Another dog

Jun 4, 2018

Another dog

Every now and again, along comes a Jane Austen adaptation, spinoff, or fanfic that, in its wishful thinking and reassuring punch-pulling, reminds us by contrast of how fearlessly unsentimental Austen is. Some of these remixes are pretty good (see under: Sittenfeld, Curtis). And some, like the movies with which I spent this past Saturday night, are pretty godawful. In my continued pursuit of Jane Austen video completism – and in an effort to warn other Janeites before they com