Like a Janeite version of Johnny Appleseed, the British-Pakistani journalist and writer Laaleen Sukhera seems to be making a habit of founding Jane Austen societies across the globe. Eight years ago, there was the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP), whose signature project was Austenistan, a collection of short stories updating Austen’s plots to contemporary Pakistan. And now Sukhera has joined forces with a Janeite friend to launch the Jane Austen Society of the Emirates

If you prefer your Jane Austen adaptations to be set in the Regency, it’s shaping up to be a good year: Sanditon’s second season has begun, and the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is coming our way sometime in 2022. If you’re open to contemporary reimaginings of Austen – and I, for one, am very, very open – then there’s even more good news: a same-sex update of Pride and Prejudice set in the world of gay men on Fire Island, New York, will start streaming on Hulu on June 3. I

The sting of rejection is an emotion whose nuances Jane Austen understood well – whether the agony of the jilted Marianne Dashwood (“Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this?”), the wounded conceit of the socially ambitious Mr. Elton (“He was too angry to say another word”), or the passionate disappointment of the young Captain Wentworth, “feeling himself ill used by so forced a relinquishment.” So Austen would likely have been well equipped to portray the emotions o

Just a few days ago, I returned from a visit to family in England. In my natural habitat, I’m not much of a tea drinker; absent a sore throat, I prefer coffee every time. But: when in Rome, etc., and so lately I’ve consumed a lot of tea. (Well, a lot for me, anyway.) Which might make me the perfect audience for “Jane Austen and the British Way of Tea,” the latest virtual talk sponsored by the North Carolina-based humanities collaborative Jane Austen & Co. The lecture, which w

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – in other words, in mid-2019 -- I wrote about a traveling exhibition of costumes from Jane Austen screen adaptations that would begin touring in the fall of 2020. Well, that didn’t happen. But now, it seems, the exhibit will actually arrive on our shores this summer: “Jane Austen: Fashion & Sensibility” is opening June 11 at Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art. For fans of Austen costuming, the exhibit promises to be a golden opportunity

Seventy-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters The letter that Jane Austen wrote to her 11-year-old niece Caroline exactly 205 years ago today (#154 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) is filled with charm and good humor. “You will receive a message from me Tomorrow; & today you will receive the parcel itself; therefore I should not like to be in that Message’s shoes, it will look so much like a fool,” Austen begins.

Last month, a storm named Eunice ravaged large swathes of Europe. In the UK, which was hit especially hard, three people were killed, more than a million homes lost power, and devastating winds damaged everything from a train station in Lancashire to an arena in London. Among the casualties were beautiful old trees on the grounds of Chawton House, the Elizabethan mansion once owned by Jane Austen’s older brother Edward Knight, which now welcomes visitors as both a research li

When NBC announced last month that it had changed the name of its new Regency-themed dating show from Pride and Prejudice: An Experiment in Romance to the tragically generic The Courtship, I wondered whether I had lost my excuse for watching. I’m supposed to be writing a Jane Austen blog here, after all. Phew! I needn’t have worried. Mere seconds into last night’s premiere, Our Author had already been mentioned – “We’re in a Jane Austen movie, like, we’re in a fairy tale,” we

Back in 2013, when the Bank of England announced that Jane Austen would be the face of the £10 note, little did we know that less than a decade later she’d become entangled with a different form of currency. Yes, it now seems that people who are into Bitcoin have some kind of weird love-hate thing with Jane Austen. Exhibit A: Last month, as blog readers will recall, the New York Times reported that Mayor Scott Conger of Jackson, Tenn., a member of a new clan of mayoral crypto