January - 2021

Journalist and author

Blog

Coming attractions?

Jan 28

Coming attractions?

Surely the universe owes us a better year than the last. And for Janeites who enjoy screen adaptations of their favorite author, the signs look . . . reasonably promising. A spate of recent news suggests that 2021, or perhaps early 2022, may bring us some goodies: --The latest feature-film version of Persuasion, already set to star Sarah Snook as Anne Elliot, now has its Captain Wentworth: British actor Joel Fry, who played the second husband of dragon queen Daenerys Targary

A Janeite goes home

Jan 25

A Janeite goes home

A man whose love for Jane Austen helped sustain him during a brutal ten-month battle with COVID and its aftermath finally returned to his London home last week. Geoffrey Woolf, 74, a recently retired lawyer, was hospitalized last March, spent two months on a ventilator, and then suffered a virus-induced stroke. Although he left acute care in August, he has spent the months since undergoing in-patient rehabilitation for paralysis and aphasia, according to the Guardian newspape

Game over

Jan 21

Game over

About eight years ago, a software engineer named Judy L. Tyrer raised more than $100,000 on Kickstarter to develop a Jane Austen-themed massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMPORG) called Ever, Jane. A beta version of the game, a project of Tyrer’s female-centric gaming company 3Turn Productions, was up and running by 2016, with plans to launch a final version in fall 2020. When I wrote about the Kickstarter appeal, I wondered how large was the overlap between Aus

Puzzled

Jan 18

Puzzled

I love jigsaw puzzles. So much so that I only occasionally dare to start one, lest my addiction/obsession eat up every waking hour until completion. But when I ran across a mention of “Pride and Puzzlement” – “a gorgeous 1000-piece jigsaw featuring hand-drawn characters from Jane Austen’s enduring novels” -- I was all set to indulge myself with a $19.99 preorder. The puzzle becomes available March 30, and I was prepared to sacrifice, say, the first week of April. Until I look

On this day in 1796. . .

Jan 14

On this day in 1796. . .

Sixtieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The record of Jane Austen’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions is so slender that it’s always tempting to invest even her throwaway comments with weighty significance. Such is arguably the trap that awaits the unwary reader of the letter that Jane Austen began writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 225 years ago today (#2 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). For a change, I

A song in our hearts

Jan 11

A song in our hearts

It’s cold outside, and the pandemic still rages. You may not feel like singing a happy tune. But if you’re a Janeite, someone else is currently doing it for you: --Back when live performances were a thing, the opera company in the city of Modesto, in California’s Central Valley, hosted a weekend-long JaneCon whose centerpiece was an orchestrated production of British composer Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park opera. Exactly a year later, the opera company is making that performa

Recovering a literary Holy Grail

Jan 7

Recovering a literary Holy Grail

It’s been more than three years since a trio of passionate Janeites formed the Godmersham Lost Sheep Society (GLOSS), an organization dedicated to recovering the scattered contents of the library owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight and housed at Godmersham, his estate in Kent, England. And now comes word that a key item in that missing collection – “the Holy Grail in these endeavors,” according to GLOSS co-founder Peter Sabor, an English professor at McGill Universit

On the road with Jane Austen

Jan 4

On the road with Jane Austen

In her too-short life, Jane Austen traveled very little, barely venturing beyond a few counties in southern and midlands England and never making it even as far as Scotland, let alone the European continent. So perhaps it was inevitable that a recent episode of The Grand Tour, a British reality show featuring comic yet rugged automotive undertakings, should have deployed her name as tiresome shorthand for decorous, unadventurous Englishness. I do not watch The Grand Tour, b