Jane Austen turns up in the most unexpected places, doesn’t she? Here’s where she’s been in the past week: --Jane Austen and true crime: The Irish Examiner gives a rave review to Thomas Morris’ The Dublin Railway Murder, a new book about a sensational 1856 slaying. “The most insatiable fans of courtroom drama and police procedurals would be satisfied,” writes reviewer Liam Heylin. “There is such colorful detail, not least that one of the justices had a youthful romance with J

They could not be defeated by a host of implacable foes: mediocre reviews, low viewership numbers, bottom-line-driven corporate decision-making, even the fickleness of a once-beloved actor. Alas, however, the #SanditonSisterhood has finally met its match in the form of a tiny, spike-protein-bedecked villain. Months ago, passionate fans of Sanditon, the PBS-ITV series based ever-so-loosely on Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel, announced plans for SandiCon 2022, a two-week co

The white supremacist sympathizer assigned to read Pride and Prejudice will now have enough time to get through all six of Jane Austen’s novels: Last week, he was sent to prison for up to two years, after an appeals court ruled that his original suspended sentence was legally problematic. You remember this story: Ben John, now twenty-two, a Brit who downloaded tens of thousands of extremist documents, including a manual with viable bomb-making instructions, lucked out last su

The venerable British Broadcasting Corporation turns 100 this year, a century after the launch of its first daily radio service. To mark the momentous occasion, the BBC has pulled together a website featuring photos and oral histories from its archives, as well as a digital collection of “100 key objects that tell the inside story of the BBC.” The lineup includes nods to the technical work of getting programs on the air (cameras, microphones, transmitters) and mementoes of th

It’s a hopeless task -- the effort to convince casual fans that Jane Austen isn’t really the patron saint of weddings. No matter how often you point out the many problematic marriages featured in her books (the Bennets! The Palmers! The elder Tilneys!), one viewing of a swoony film adaptation undoes all your good work. So you can’t blame local officials in Bath, England, for deciding to cash in on this reputation with their latest wedding venue: a “Jane Austen room” in the ci

For the most part, I love my fellow Janeites. By and large, we are a smart, thoughtful bunch who, whatever our political, temperamental, or interpretive differences, do our best to treat others with kindness and generosity. Is this because kind, thoughtful people are drawn to Austen’s work? Or does Austen make her readers kinder and more thoughtful? Chicken and egg. You decide. Of course, there are some counterexamples: Over the past few years, as blog readers will recall, we

Back in my school days, we eager young grade-grubbers used to trade advice on which teachers marked harshly and which were more easygoing. To the list of old softies it seems we may now add Timothy Spencer, the British judge who drew mostly unfavorable headlines last summer, when he gave a suspended sentence and a lengthy reading list to a young man convicted of possessing terrorism-related materials – tens of thousands of extremist documents, including a bomb-making manual.

When it comes to climate change, is Jane Austen part of the problem? In a grossly oversimplified nutshell, that’s the question that will be tackled by EcoAusten, a project launching this month over at The Jane Austen Review, a two-year-old website sponsored by Pacific Lutheran University. EcoAusten was launched in response both to its creators’ experience of climate change in the Pacific Northwest – PLU is located in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash. – and to the work of Indian novel

Seventy-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Moving out of one house and into another is a stressful, time-consuming business these days. Apparently, it was ever thus – or so we might conclude from the letter that Jane Austen began writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 221 years ago today (#29 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). A few weeks earlier, the Austen parents had announced the family’s impending move