Last week, I reported on proliferating Persuasion adaptations – a straight-to-streaming update that aired last December, two period feature films currently in production, and a theatrical adaptation opening off-Broadway this fall. “Persuasion is having quite a year,” I wrote. Turns out I didn’t know the half of it, because two more Persuasion adaptations are on their way to us: *A song cycle that tells the story of Persuasion using original lyrics set to Beethoven chamber mus

Shooting has begun on the second season of Sanditon, the ITV/PBS series based on the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death. A PBS press release issued last week informs us that the new story will pick up nine months after the first season’s cliffhanger ending, in which our beloved hero, the dark, brooding, super-handsome, secretly sensitive Sidney Parker. . . --Psst! Best not to say any more about him. --Wait--what? --Look, just trust me on this, OK? --Fine. Wha

Persuasion is having quite a year. Last December, a charmless modern update called Modern Persuasion – the dull, on-the-nose title gave fair warning of what was to come – went straight to streaming video. This summer, Netflix is shooting a period adaptation starring Dakota Johnson, while a second period adaptation, this one starring Sarah Snook, is in pre-production for Searchlight Pictures. And now comes word that a new theatrical adaptation of the novel will premiere off-Br

Two months ago, I noted a Janeite milestone: the one hundredth birthday of Helen Lefroy, a dedicated Janeite with a familial link to Jane Austen. I had met Lefroy back in 2011, when book research took me on the Jane Austen Society of North America’s tour of Austen’s England. Sadly, it turns out that the very day my blog post appeared, just four weeks after celebrating her centennial, Lefroy passed away. I learned the news just recently, when the Times of London published its

Nearly two years ago, word trickled out that a same-sex update of Pride and Prejudice, set on the gay mecca of New York’s Fire Island, would stream on the much-hyped Quibi platform. Long story short: Quibi, which delivered bite-size news and entertainment videos directly to users’ phones, launched in April 2020 and was dead by December. And Trip, the proposed Austen update, which was to be written by American actor and comedian Joel Kim Booster, never made it onto the roster.

Some weeks, it’s not clear what tidbit of gossip or news deserves mention as the biggest story in Jane Austen fandom. Other weeks, a major streaming service announces plans for a Regency-themed reality dating series titled Pride and Prejudice: An Experiment in Romance. “An as-yet-unknown heroine searching for love will be chosen to be a part of a groundbreaking social experiment to find her faithful duke,” the Peacock streaming service announced last week, in a press release

A poet whose work I didn’t know died the other day. Stephen Dunn was a Pulitzer Prize winner who “specialized in poems about surviving, coping with and looking for meaning in the ordinary passages of life,” according to his New York Times obituary. I don’t read much poetry, so ordinarily I would have passed over this news with little interest. Except that in his 2003 collection Local Visitations, Dunn included a series of poems in which he imagined famous nineteenth-century w

Last year, as beloved Jane Austen festivals across the globe moved online, one brand-new event managed an in-person debut, complete with masks, hand sanitizer, and social distancing. And now the Jane Austen International Film Festival, held last September in Bath, England, is back for a second year, with a July 23 deadline to submit films for consideration. The festival, which runs this year from September 21 to 24, accepts work in ten categories, including animation, comedy,

Sixty-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. You know how as soon as you return from vacation, it feels as though you’d never left? Apparently, Jane Austen was familiar with this phenomenon – or so we might conclude from the letter she finished writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 213 years ago today (#55 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). Austen had spent the previous two weeks visiting her brother Edward’s