The unholy spectacle of a Russian coach berating a fifteen-year-old figure skater after an epic public fail shadowed by a doping scandal cast a pall over the recently-concluded Winter Olympics in Beijing. Or at least it did for me, since I watch the Winter Olympics solely for the heart-stopping beauty of figure skating. Perhaps I would have cheered up if only I had known more about a different Russian athlete: twenty-six-year-old Yulia Kanakina, a competitor in skeleton, that

Texts and emails have much to recommend them, but it’s hard not to wonder how much their prevalence will handicap future biographers. It’s bad enough that Cassandra Austen had matches to hand on the day she decided to cull the letters from her sister; imagine how little we might know about Jane Austen if Cassandra had been able to click a “delete” button. Luckily for us, however, nineteenth-century folk were, by necessity, indefatigable letter-writers. And so it is that next

Finally, NBC has released a trailer for The Courtship, the upcoming reality-TV show featuring Austen-era costumes and dating rituals, and I’m happy to report that the program is clearly going to offer a completely authentic portrait of Regency England . . . . . . if your only reference points are recent TV portrayals of Regency England. Just like on Bridgerton, we’re getting candy-colored gowns, multiracial casting, and a mature female narrator with a posh British accent (sam

Seventy-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Exactly 209 years ago today, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her brother Frank, or perhaps to his wife. And . . . we have no idea what it said. The letter (#83 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) survives only as a scrap bearing a date and Austen’s signature – a scrap that, decades after his sister’s death, Frank sent to an aristocrat seeking an Austen letter for a frien

As Valentine’s Day dawns, all across the Netflix-speaking Janeite world, we are waiting impatiently for the new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s most romantic novel, Persuasion—possibly coming to our small screens at Easter, according to a 2021 interview unearthed by the indispensable Maggie Sullivan of AustenBlog. Meanwhile, however, those Janeites in the UK, or those of us prepared to fly there, can get a jump on the you-pierce-my-soul action: A modernized, theatrical versi

Sanditon, the PBS-ITV series based ever-so-loosely on the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death, has been an acquired taste from the start. (I never acquired it.) But I was puzzled by a recent piece about changes planned for the show’s second season, which premieres on PBS on March 20. Sanditon, you will recall, was greatly hyped, poorly reviewed, and initially canceled after its UK airing, only to rise from the dead following the US broadcast and a year of campaign

March is shaping up to be a big month for Janeites who like Austen-related TV and aren’t too picky about its relationship to anything actually written by Jane Austen. On March 20, of course, PBS will begin broadcasting the second season of Sanditon, which started out as an adaptation of the novel Austen left unfinished at her death but which has by now traveled far, far from the original. If you can’t wait that long, however, you can get your sorta-semi-Austenesque-ish fix tw

Austen-influenced crafts come in many forms. There are knitting patterns. There are board games. There are tote bags and jewelry and perfume. And now there are cookies. Last year, the Washington Post explains, a young British design historian named Ella Hawkins sent her mother a batch of ornately hand-painted biscuits – that’s cookies to us Americans – as a Valentine’s Day gift. After an enthusiastic response, Hawkins followed up with a set of painted biscuits inspired by Wil