Thirty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Talk about burying the lead. The letter that Jane Austen began writing to her friend Martha Lloyd exactly 206 years ago today (#77 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) covers a multitude of topics: Martha’s ongoing visit to a dying friend, the purchase of a grey cloak and some calico, the comings and goings of assorted relatives and acquaintances. And then, more than half

Last summer, when I learned that the Hallmark Channel would celebrate Christmas by broadcasting a movie based on a Jane Austen fanfic titled Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe, I snapped up the Kindle edition of the book and started reading: A Taylor Swift cover of “Last Christmas,” originally recorded by Wham! in 1986, strummed from the stereo of the sleek, black town car, where Darcy was sitting in the back seat. It is never a good sign when you crack open a new book and y

Thanksgiving Day may seem to be a holiday with no connection whatsoever to the works of Jane Austen. True, her major novels include the occasional reference to a holiday food – in past years, I’ve covered turkey, potatoes, and pie – but the pickings are pretty slim. One Austen character, however, has a profound, if heretofore unrecognized, connection to the holiday. For at about the age of seventeen, Jane Austen created Charlotte Lutterell -- the patron saint of leftovers. Th

Jane Austen’s novels have provided the inspiration for any number of musical treatments, from operas and a classical instrumental suite to both original and jukebox musical theater. But only recently, it seems, has anyone had the idea of training a computer to write songs by feeding it the text of Emma. Yes, that’s what they’re up to over at Google, as we learned last week from an article made available online by two of the company’s researchers, Pablo Samuel Castro and Maria

From time to time, you happen across a story that makes clear how entirely some people miss the point of Jane Austen. For instance, when you learn that an effort to commemorate her ethically rigorous work with a dozen brass paving-stone plaques has been temporarily thwarted because a thief walked off with two of the plaques, literally before the glue had dried. Such was last weekend’s sad (but, let’s face it, also kind of hilarious -- at least that part is Austenian) story fr

This business of Austen trend-spotting is getting to be exhausting. Barely four months ago, I noted that the two-decade-long craze for adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels seems to have inaugurated a more recent craze for second-order Austen spinoffs: adaptations of works that are themselves Austen adaptations. Broaden the category to include films that constitute original works of fanfic -- one-and-a-half order adaptations? -- and the numbers multiply. Before the year is out,

Back in middle and high school, I took French. In college, I took Italian. I enjoyed them both – beautiful languages, fascinating cultures and histories, great national literatures. Alas, however, it seems I should have been studying Portuguese. This belated realization came to me last week, when I learned that Brazilian TV had just concluded the six-month, hundred-hour run of a racy new early-evening soap opera, Orgulho e Paixão (Pride and Passion), that gleefully mingles ch

Emma really does seem to be having a moment. Last week, I wrote about plans for both a new filmed adaptation of the novel and a remake of Amy Heckerling’s immortal Clueless, the 1995 movie that updated the story to high school in Beverly Hills. I’d already taken note of a musical version of Clueless, which is opening soon Off-Broadway. But I’d missed the news of yet another Emma-influenced project: a five-year-anniversary sequel to the 2013-14 YouTube series Emma Approved, a

Sometimes it feels as if only die-hard Janeites are still thinking about Jane Austen. And other times – like these past few weeks -- you’d think the whole world was composed of die-hard Janeites, given the sudden flurry of news about impending or recently released Austen-themed work. Herewith a roundup: 1. Actress Anya Taylor-Joy is set to star in a new adaptation of Emma, with a screenplay by New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the youngest-ever winner of the Man Booker Pri