Genuinely good news – a commodity that’s been in short supply this past year – came our way earlier this month, with the announcement (see here, here and here) that an extraordinary collection of books and manuscripts would be acquired by public institutions in Britain instead of dispersed into private hands. Among the precious items included in the Honresfield Library are two letters written by Jane Austen, including the earliest known to survive – the famous 1796 letter to

This past year, we can probably all agree, hasn’t been one of the planet’s best. But there’s still time to end 2021 on a happier note – literally. A multi-disciplinary community of artists called The Rally Cat is currently streaming Elinor & Marianne, a song cycle that “compresses the nineteenth-century novel Sense and Sensibility into a fifty-five-minute emotional tour-de-force,” according to online coverage. The music is by Aferdian, setting a libretto by Marella Martin Koc

Christmas is almost here, but I have no sugar plums or partridge-equipped pear trees with which to gift my blog readers. Instead, I will share with you some of my favorite recent examples of the internet’s inability to get straight on even the simplest facts about Jane Austen. #1: Cradle “Who doesn’t think they know Jane Austen?” asks the author of a listicle on the website of Book Riot, headlined “13 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen.” Well, here’s one thing I didn’t

Jane Austen isn’t just for girls, of course, but the Austenesque tidbits that the internet has tossed my way lately happen to focus on females of the species: --Alicia Silverstone, who joined TikTok some six months ago, seems to post a Clueless-themed mini-video roughly once a month. And who can blame her? It’s still her greatest role, in one of the greatest of Jane Austen adaptations. Last week, in her most recent self-homage, Silverstone plays the viral tell-me-without-tell

Two hundred and forty-six years ago today, a daughter was born to Cassandra Leigh Austen and her husband, the Reverend George Austen. The new arrival "is to be Jenny,” he wrote to a relative the next day. As that baby girl grew into the woman who would become one of the giants of English literature, her birthday did not always bring happiness. On December 16, 1804, the day that Jane Austen turned twenty-nine, her fifty-something friend and mentor Anne Lefroy was killed in a r

In George Orwell’s 1984, the dictatorial regime ruling Oceania requires its minions to drop documentation of inconvenient historical facts down the “memory hole,” the better to pretend that the party line is eternal and unchanging. Jane Austen’s world is a long way from Orwell’s, but the memory hole came to mind recently when I happened across PBS’s latest publicity for its loosely-inspired-by-Austen costume drama Sanditon, whose second season begins airing in March. Last yea

Kids! Always leaving their homework to the last minute! Last summer, as blog readers will recall, a British judge sentenced a young man convicted of possessing terrorism-related materials to a course of classic reading. "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 but instead got a two-year suspended sentence. “Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens' A Tale of Two Citi

Seventieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The author of Pride and Prejudice may have been an anonymous figure to much of the world, but her nieces and nephews knew that Jane Austen was the person to consult if you aspired to write fiction. Her helpful, encouraging letters to her brother James’ children, Anna and James Edward, are famous for the insights they offer into Austen’s own literary philosophy and writing process. (See here, here, and

Jane Austen assuredly never saw a penguin: According to the Zoological Society of London, it wasn’t until 1865, nearly fifty years after Austen’s death, that a British zoo first displayed one of the adorable aquatic birdies. But that hasn’t prevented Penny Ives, a British children’s book author and illustrator, from creating a rather silly, but also rather charming, series of six watercolors featuring Jane Austen and a penguin named Darcy. Ives retails the images as greeting