Apparently, I’m not the only Jane Austen completist out there. Last week, as blog readers will recall, the New York auction house Swann Galleries auctioned off first editions of all Austen’s novels – three-volume sets of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, and the combined four-volume edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. The sale result can be summed up in the headline on Swann’s press release: “Jane Austen Rules.” (Well, we knew that

The new feature-film adaptation of Emma opened this past weekend, but not, alas, in my neck of the woods, where we proles must wait until the March 6 wide release. Nonetheless, reviews have made clear that the new movie’s visual language is among its most notable elements. At least five internet headlines (here, here, here, here, and here) describe the movie as “stylish,” while the New York Times opines that it could have been made “using Wes Anderson software,” which will s

Fifty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s no secret that Jane Austen held a jaundiced view of the frequent childbearing that so often accompanied marriage in her era. But the letter she began writing to her niece Fanny Knight exactly 203 years ago today (#151 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) contains one of her few suggestions for how to solve this problem. “Good Mrs Deedes!” Austen wrote, referring to F

We’re just days away from one of the year’s big Janeite events: Friday’s U.S. opening of the new feature film adaptation of Emma, a week after the Valentine’s Day release in the UK. It’s the first big-screen Emma since the 1996 version that made Gwyneth Paltrow a star. The new Emma. – yes, that’s the title, “.” and all; not since the controversial ampersand in the title of 2005’s Pride & Prejudice has so much ink been spilled over a punctuation mark -- has some sterling crede

I was born with a completist gene. I like to finish things up – books, TV series, leftovers. I like to own full sets of things. I abhor the imperfect, the partially completed, the abandoned-halfway-through. I know Freud has a word for this, but I don’t want to discuss it. Instead, I will note that a rare book sale taking place next week seems made for the likes of me. On February 20, Swann Galleries, a New York auction house, will auction first editions of all Jane Austen’s n

Another day, another Jane Austen event I wish I could attend. Tomorrow, Gill Hornby, whose new novel Miss Austen explores the relationship between Jane Austen and her older sister, Cassandra, will discuss the book with Helena Kelly, the author of 2016’s controversial Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. The event will take place in Hungerford, a town in the south-central English county of Berkshire. Hornby -- who is also the author of an Austen biography aimed at tweens, Jane Aus

Making a mistake in print, and being forced to acknowledge it publicly in the corrections column: It’s every journalist’s nightmare. And it’s happened to all of us. In my time, I have misspelled names, mixed up business deals, miscalculated sums, misstated a legal ruling. . . (Ugh. Do I have to keep going? Just thinking about it puts knots in my stomach.) So I empathized late last month when the New York Times was forced to acknowledge a truly embarrassing mistake: “In an ear

The reimagining of Chawton House, the Austen-connected stately home and research library in Hampshire, England, continues apace – which is good news for Janeites. In the latest dispatch from the trenches, Emma Yandle, Chawton’s new curator and collections manager, stars in a video aimed at North American donors that highlights the ongoing effort to rehang Chawton’s collection of portraits of female writers, artists, and actors. The new arrangements wlll make the best work mor