Wandering around the English countryside in early autumn while talking about literature: sounds idyllic, no? And so I sighed enviously as I perused the program of Creative Footsteps, a literary festival starting Saturday in the English county of Hampshire. Jane Austen may be Hampshire’s most famous literary resident, but she wasn’t the only one. Creative Footsteps encompasses not only garden tours and arts workshops at Chawton House, the Elizabethan manor once owned by Austen

How long does it take to read a Jane Austen novel? At roughly three hundred pages apiece, her books are far shorter than the works of many other writers, from the eighteenth century onward. Not for Austen the epic scope, and correspondingly epic number of pages, of a Clarissa, a War and Peace, or a David Copperfield. (Or, for that matter, an Outlander or a late-in-series Harry Potter.) A competent reader with a reasonable amount of spare time can probably polish off even Mans

“Mouni Roy Dresses Like A Jane Austen Heroine In Her Latest Photoshoot And Totally Nails It,” proclaimed a recent headline on the website of the Indian TV news channel CNN-News18. I will admit that, since I don’t follow Bollywood, I had never previously heard of Mouni Roy, a thirty-five-year-old actor and model who works primarily in Indian movies and television shows. I will further admit that I am no expert on the clothing of the Regency. Still, it doesn’t take a degree fro

It’s always nice to know that other people value Our Jane the way we do. Like, value her in dollars. Last week, as blog readers will recall, Christie’s auctioned off an extraordinary rare book collection that included a set of Jane Austen first editions, among them a Mansfield Park once owned by the great American songwriter Jerome Kern. Christie’s had estimated the sale prices for the books – three-volume sets of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensi

Sixty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Nostalgia for Jane Austen’s era has always struck me as misplaced, especially among women who take for granted small matters like financial equality, higher education, contraception, and the vote. But if you do nurture a tiny hankering for the world of the Regency, you may be cured by an anecdote in the letter Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 207 years ago today (#88 in Deirdre Le

Owning first editions of Jane Austen’s novels – ideally, as I’ve noted before, of all Jane Austen’s novels – must be . . . pretty cool. Owning an Austen first that was previously owned by yet another famous person must be . . . super-cool. Or so I would hypothesize, based on zero first-hand experience of same. But if you have some spare change lying around – OK, a lot of spare change – tomorrow will bring the opportunity to test out this hypothesis. Because beginning at 10 am

Ah, the passive voice. It conceals a multitude of sins. The other day, I happened across one of my favorite genres of newspaper story: the aspirational real estate listing, Jane Austen division. It seems that a two-bedroom apartment in a converted --but still palatial! -- seventeenth-century Hertfordshire mansion is up for sale, for the low, low price of £835,000 (about $1.1 million). After downloading the brochure, the better to ogle the gorgeous façade, breathtaking public

Last week, a British judge imposed an unusual sentence on a young man convicted of possessing terrorism-related materials. "Have you read Dickens? Austen?” Judge Timothy Spencer asked the defendant, twenty-one-year-old Ben John, who had faced up to fifteen years in prison. “Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.” Early next year, the judge continued, he would summon John back for

For an actor, it must be frustrating to realize that you will be remembered almost solely for a role you played at the age of eighteen. But at least Alicia Silverstone, whose acting career apparently peaked twenty-six years ago, seems to be having fun with this fact of her life. Back in 1995, Silverstone’s star was launched when she played Cher, the heroine of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. And in the three months since joining TikTok, the super-brief-video platform, Silverstone