Sixty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen was perfectly capable of writing a sensitive condolence message. The letters she wrote her brother Frank in 1805, breaking the news of their father’s sudden death, are models of the form – kind, compassionate, and thorough in answering all the questions she knew he would have. Such is not the tone of the letter Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 210 years ago today (#74 in Deid

By now, I’m used to reading real estate listings that hype every tiniest link to Jane Austen: An oast house on a farm where her father once lived! A villa where she visited friends! The family home that played Longbourn in an iconic Pride and Prejudice adaptation! So it comes as a real shock when a listing doesn’t even bother to mention a tangential Austen connection. Log on to the website of Country Life, the real estate bible of the British rich, and you’ll find this headli

Back in late 2019, when corona was just a neighborhood in Queens, the news broke that Hollywood was considering a television reboot of the Janeite classic Clueless. At the time, I was not excited. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film, which updates Emma to high school in Beverly Hills, is immortal perfection, in my humble opinion; I felt – and feel -- no need to watch anyone else mess with that perfection. Ever. So I was far from heartbroken to learn, earlier this month, that the Peaco

Last month, we Janeites felt a tad confused -- dare I say clueless? -- when Netflix and MRC Entertainment announced plans to produce a new adaptation of Persuasion that would take a “modern, witty approach to a beloved story.” We couldn’t figure out if this meant the film would be a modernized update of Jane Austen’s story, or a straightforward (yet fun and unstuffy!) adaptation of the 1817 original. Not that we couldn’t handle either alternative – as if! -- but we just wante

Back in 2011, when the research for my book Among the Janeites took me on the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual tour of England, our Winchester stop featured a conversation with a group of British Janeites that included Austen expert and sort-of-Austen-relative-by-marriage Helen Lefroy. The conversation was friendly, although I seem to recall that Lefroy was startled by one tidbit: the news that some American Janeites think Austen’s elderly mother showed an unmate

Anyone whose college papers reside on now-unreadable floppy disks has probably wondered whether the human race is on the brink of an information disaster, with increasing amounts of irreplaceable data stored using methods inevitably fated for obsolescence. You may not have figured that Jane Austen could play a role in solving this information-age conundrum. But last month, chemistry researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (now do not be suspecting me of a pun) publis

The #Sisterhood, it seemed, had won. For more than a year, the online fandom known as the #SanditonSisterhood has lobbied tirelessly for a second season of Sanditon, the canceled PBS-ITV series based (oh-so-loosely) on the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death. #Sisterhood members tweeted with abandon. They commissioned sand art. They launched a Change.org petition that drew more than eighty-eight thousand signatures. They refused to accept as final the series’ cliff

Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears and chant “la-la-la” whenever anyone threatens to disturb their view of Our Author as the creator of escapist fantasies untainted by real-world unpleasantness. Austen’s legions of fans may include a few such ostriches, but most of the Janeites I know are happy to debate the degree of Austen’s engagement with war, politics, and feminist social

Years ago, when the Harper Collins Austen Project was announcing which contemporary authors would undertake its modernizations of Austen novels, my husband suggested that E.L. James, of Fifty Shades of Grey fame, would be the perfect choice for Mansfield Park. (Inexperienced yet clear-eyed young woman wins the heart of rakish seducer? Check. Explicit BDSM sex scenes? Um. . .) Alas, the Austen Project fizzled out before the release of its MP update. But now it seems that the G