March - 2021

Journalist and author

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Happy birthday indeed

Mar 29

Happy birthday indeed

For most people, this past year has been at best pretty bad and at worst utterly tragic. On the bright side, however, the challenge of pandemic quarantine seems to have inspired the partners of Janeites to step up their gift-giving game. Last summer, as blog readers will recall, a British graphic designer gave his Janeite girlfriend a handcrafted Jane Austen Monopoly set as a second-anniversary gift. And now a Philadelphia-area husband has marked his wife’s fortieth birthday

Mars and Venus

Mar 25

Mars and Venus

These days, Jane Austen enthusiasts are often typecast as college girls swooning over Matthew Macfadyen, or middle-aged women dressing up in bonnets, or cat-loving spinsters sipping cups of tea. Above all: female. That hasn’t always been the case, as reception histories by the likes of Claire Harman, Claudia Johnson, and Devoney Looser have shown: For much of the last two centuries, Austen-appreciation was considered a thoroughly masculine pursuit. Sometimes Austen was trivia

Small world

Mar 22

Small world

The world of the British aristocracy can seem very small indeed. Witness this month’s auction of items from the estate of the late Patricia Knatchbull, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma, a royal cousin who just happens to have been a descendant-by-marriage of Jane Austen. Pay close attention, children: This is all a bit complicated, as genealogy tends to be when you’re dealing with centuries of inbreeding. Patricia was the elder daughter of Louis Mountbatten, the 1st Earl Mou

Jane Austen wrote here?

Mar 18

Jane Austen wrote here?

If you spend a lot of time online, it can sometimes seem that every house for sale in England has a tangential Jane Austen connection that real estate agents are ready to exploit for profit. And all too often, credulous journalists are equally ready to report as fact every breathless speculation about houses that “inspired Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ” So how refreshing to read a real estate story that takes the time to debunk a demonstrably false Austen-linked marke

Sanditon fans build a second season

Mar 15

Sanditon fans build a second season

It’s been more than a year since the producers of Sanditon announced that the show, a TV mini-series based on the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death, would end after a single season. And despite a passionate online fan base (#SanditonSisterhood), a tentative feeler from Amazon Prime Video, a rumored casting call, and a couple of works of sand art, there’s still no definitive word that anything has changed. But those aforementioned passionate fans are not just wait

Old issues, new questions

Mar 11

Old issues, new questions

Five years ago, I wrote a magazine article about the controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s repugnant racial views – an aspect of the twenty-eighth U.S. president’s record that had long been familiar to historians but that suddenly seemed urgent to a new generation of students and scholars. “It’s all about the questions we ask. The questions have changed,” a retired Princeton history professor told me at the time. “I mean, the questions always change. That’s why we keep writing hi

Janeites from eight to eighty-eight

Mar 8

Janeites from eight to eighty-eight

We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels can be enjoyed at any age, albeit in different ways, and seldom has a week’s news brought such a graphic demonstration of the truth of this axiom: * In Britain, an eight-year-old homeschooler named Arabella Duffy has been alleviating her pandemic anxiety by making short videos about historical figures and sharing the results on YouTube. Arabella, a winsome blonde with a cut-glass accent, has performed in costume as Queen Elizabeth

More name-dropping

Mar 4

More name-dropping

The virtual ink had barely dried on my recent blog post about a questionable list of Jane Austen-themed names for baby boys when I happened across a companion piece: “15 Romantic Girl Names for Fans of Jane Austen.” And once again I found myself wondering . . . which Jane Austen fans are these, exactly? Now, many of the names on the list are entirely unobjectionable from a Janeite point of view. No complaints here if you’d like to call your newborn Anne, Catherine, Elinor, El

Name-dropping

Mar 1

Name-dropping

It’s a well-established Janeite practice to name children and pets after Austen characters: while researching my book Among the Janeites, I met an adorable toddler called Elinor, and on my blog, I’ve written about a penguin known as Knightley and a rooster, a guinea pig, a chihuahua, and a rescue kitten, all named after Mr. Darcy. Still, I’m a bit bemused by this list of “15 Dashing Boy Names for Fans of Jane Austen.” It’s not just that one-third of the names on the list – Br