Last month brought the sad news that an eagerly awaited Austen adaptation – the Searchlight Pictures version of Persuasion, starring Sarah Snook – wouldn’t make it to the big screen after all. As if to compensate disappointed Janeites, however, now there are signs that another long-gestating Austen-adjacent movie may be on its way to us. Movie rumors materialized almost as soon as Jo Baker published her 2013 book Longbourn, a novel about the lives of the Bennet family’s serva

Sixty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote the first substantial account of her life, sometimes gets bad press. His 1869 Memoir of Jane Austen has been criticized for portraying his famous aunt as a sweet, domestic little lady who never let writing interfere with her needlework – a Victorian angel in the house whom contemporary readers find hard to square with the spiky, sarcastic voice

In the social world of Jane Austen’s Regency, young people navigated a complex set of unwritten rules for managing friendship and courtship. Unrelated men and women could correspond only once they were engaged. Calling a friend by her Christian name represented a significant advance in intimacy. Dancing together more than twice at the same ball would raise eyebrows. Apparently, not much has changed – or so I concluded recently, after my seventeen-year-old niece did her best t

Once again, it’s time for every Janeite’s favorite sport: eying up palatial real estate with tangential Jane Austen associations. Today’s entry concerns Milgate Park, a nearly seven-hundred-year-old red-brick mansion in southeastern England, with nine bedrooms, nearly ten thousand square feet of interior space, several roomy outbuildings, and more than five acres of grounds featuring a pond, a reflecting pool, and a tennis court. Even among the rarefied company of fancy old h

“Lindsay declared her love for Jane Austen on the set of ‘Winter House,’ ” my daily Google alert for Our Jane informed me the other week. Naturally, I was intrigued. Especially since the headline, on the entertainment website Brinkwire, continued, “. . . but are they still together?” Let’s back up, just in case you, like me, were unaware of the existence of a new Bravo reality TV show called “Winter House,” which – as I learned from the invaluable Wikipedia – is a mashup betw

Last year, as George Floyd’s murder sparked a racial reckoning around the globe, the public humanities collaborative Jane Austen & Co. sponsored “Race & the Regency,” a series of nine Zoom talks examining Austen’s life, times, and influence through the prism of race. Now the same organization, a partnership between the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Jane Austen Summer Program and the Chapel Hill Public Library, has announced another fascinating look at Austen and

We EngLit types are not always as adept at math as we are at literary analysis. But we’ll need to brush up our arithmetical skills this weekend, when a tantalizing virtual Jane Austen conference is taking place across multiple time zones on three continents. “Jane Austen in the Pan Pacific,” co-sponsored by the Hawaii and Southern California regions of the Jane Austen Society of North America, starts at 1 pm on Saturday – if you live in Hawaii. Or 3 pm – if you live in Califo

Is the pandemic over yet? The answer, of course, depends on where you live, but one hopeful sign that some of us are partway back to normality may lie in the renaissance of in-person Austen fan conventions. In September, revelers in Regency attire returned to the streets of Bath, England, for the Jane Austen Festival. Last month, Janeites gathered in Chicago for the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting. And on Saturday – or Friday evening, for those o

It’s the start of a new month, and thus the perfect time to update some old stories: * All dressed up: Over the summer, New York bridal-gown designer Jennyvi Dizon offered free Austen-inspired gowns to Janeites willing to model her creations at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Chicago last month. The results – including a set of three gowns inspired by the Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility – can now be seen on her blog, and very lov