It’s the scary season – ghosts, witches, creaking doors in haunted houses. For Janeites, however, the Internet’s frightening capacity to spread inaccurate information about Jane Austen never has an off-season. Herewith, a roundup of the past few months: * Last June, if you had turned to the lifestyle website Your Tango for its regular “Love Horoscope” feature, you would have found this useful tidbit of information, under the heading “Famous weddings and marriages that took pl

We Janeites would kill to live in an Austen-linked stately home. That goes without saying. But – is it possible that such properties are actually not especially desirable to the rest of the world? That’s what I found myself wondering after a Janeite friend (thanks, @AusteninBoston!) alerted me to a new-ish real estate listing for Scarlets, the eighteenth-century Berkshire mansion once owned by Jane Austen’s maternal uncle James Leigh-Perrot and his difficult wife, Jane Leigh-

“You can never have too much Persuasion,” I opined three months ago, as each day seemed to bring a new announcement of a forthcoming adaptation of Jane Austen’s last completed novel, in versions for stage, screen, and concert hall. Apparently, however, I was wrong. In a Vogue Australia interview posted online last week, actor Sarah Snook announced that Searchlight Pictures (formerly Fox Searchlight) has canceled its projected big-screen version of the novel, in which she was

Sixty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Last month, I noted that Jane Austen’s account of a September 1813 dental visit could serve as an effective antidote to any sentimental longing for life in Austen’s era, that simpler, happier time before the existence of effective anesthetic. Today: Nostalgia Antidote, Part Deux. The letter Jane Austen finished writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 206 years ago today (#121 in Deirdre Le Faye’s s

Last summer, the pandemic programmers of Chawton House, the Elizabethan manor once owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward, revived the estate’s dormant podcast, which had been produced a handful of times in 2012-13 and monthly from 2015-17. In its new incarnation, the podcast currently runs to nine episodes, some of them highlighting Chawton’s programming and others discussing the long and complex renovation that brought the building back from the brink of dereliction in the 1

Jane Austen, it seems, is the go-to novelist for anyone who wants to write about money. In 1937, the poet W.H. Auden famously remarked upon her clear-eyed understanding of “the amorous effects of ‘brass.’ ” In 2013, the economist Thomas Piketty used her work to illustrate his argument about the persistence of income inequality. And last week, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, cited Austen again, in a column headlined “

Who’s Your Favorite Darcy is, by now, a classic Janeite pastime, pitting fervent Firthians against zealous MacFadyenites, while small but enthusiastic coteries of Olivierists and Rintoulers heckle from the sidelines. Who’s Your Favorite Willoughby, by contrast, isn’t even up for debate, since everyone knows that Greg Wise, who played Marianne Dashwood’s faithless lover in the 1995 Emma Thompson-Ang Lee big-screen version of Sense and Sensibility, definitively inhabited the ro

Between her father’s death in January 1805 and her move into Chawton cottage in July 1809, Jane Austen was . . . not homeless, certainly, but not securely housed, either. Along with her mother, her sister, and, eventually, her old friend Martha Lloyd, Austen cycled through a number of semi-permanent addresses, first taking rooms in a couple of increasingly down-market buildings in Bath, and then moving in with her brother Frank’s growing family in Southampton. The security an