Jane Austen seems to have spent as little time as possible in the kitchen, leaving the cooking to the women she lived with and the servants they supervised. And, frankly, that’s a good thing: As Mr. Darcy might have said, Austen employed her time much better. “Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb,” she wrote in an 1816 letter (#145 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of the correspondence), apropos of her I-don’t-know-h

By now, we would all be happy to consign 2020 to the trash bin of history. Let’s reboot! Remake! Recycle and replace! Alas, another four months must pass before we can turn in this awful year for an upgrade. But the same spirit of renovation is afoot in Greater Austenland, as we await several Austen-themed projects that represent not so much a break with Janeite history as a refurbishment thereof: * Has your DVD of the iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice – Colin Fir

Did Jane Austen want the world to know her name? It’s a complicated question. In January 1796, in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, the twenty-year-old Austen joked, “I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last Letter, for I write only for Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument” (letter #2 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). But fifteen years later, when she finally became a published author, Austen chose anonymity over

Three years ago, blog readers will recall, a branch of the UK’s Society of Young Publishers sponsored a Jane Austen pub quiz – i.e., a trivia contest, like those held in neighborhood watering-holes across the land – in Oxford, England. At the time, one of my commenters suggested that US participants should petition to attend via Skype. Be careful what you wish for. Thanks to COVID-19, a UK-based Jane Austen trivia competition will now be open to participants located anywhere

Earlier this summer, it looked like COVID would take the life of a seventy-three-year-old British lawyer named Geoff Woolf. During his long, lonely hospital stay, which included months on a ventilator, his adult sons had tried to keep him stimulated with audiobooks, especially one longtime favorite: Pride and Prejudice. But along the way, Woolf suffered a massive virus-induced stroke, and his prospects seemed dim; he remained in a coma even after coming off the ventilator, an

Remind me: How many novels did Jane Austen write, again? Just kidding! Yes, of course, the answer is six. But if you didn’t know that already, you might be confused by the coverage of Rachel Cohen’s recently published memoir Austen Years, in which Cohen describes how her experience of new motherhood and her grief over her father’s death enriched her understanding of Austen’s books. Not all of Austen’s books, though: Cohen’s subtitle is A Memoir in Five Novels. Which five? Oh,

I haven’t set foot in a movie theater in five months. (March 7. Multiplex up the road from here. The new adaptation of Emma, a pretty good way to go out.) This is certainly the longest cinematic drought in my adult life. Television is all well and good, but I crave the big screen like a desert wanderer craves an oasis. Perhaps that’s why I perked up so unreasonably at the tiny scrap of Jane Austen news thrown our way last month when the UK film magazine Screen Daily published

Jane Austen has been used and abused in so many different ways by now, pressed into service to sell everything from perfume to romance novels to white supremacy, that you’d think nothing could surprise us Janeites. And yet I did find it a bit of a shock to learn about a recent Australian sexual harassment suit in which Austen was invoked – to defend the harasser. Back in 2015-16, a solicitor named Owen Hughes, the principal of a small law firm in the Australian state of New S

The proliferation of face masks in every conceivable style, color, fabric, and design is either an encouraging sign of inexhaustible human creativity and entrepreneurship, or a really depressing indicator of how long the coronavirus is likely to be with us. By now, it’s possible to buy luxury face masks in pastel-colored silk, or Disney Princess-themed face masks for small children, or slightly creepy face masks featuring your favorite breed of dog. So it should come as no su