When I was a little girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse. I liked setting up tiny roomscapes filled with detailed, perfectly manageable facsimiles of the things I saw around me – spaces that I controlled with the iron rod of a dictator. (Yes, I know, Dr. Freud.) No surprise, then, that my imagination was captured by Mary Norton’s Borrowers series, which concerns a family of tiny people living under the floorboards of an English home and furnishing their own rooms with misla

Since March 1, we’ve swooned (tastefully) over Sanditon, chuckled at (or ignored) The Courtship, held our breath for Bridgerton’s ve-e-ry slow-burning (but tasteful) romance, and prepared ourselves to welcome the Netflix Persuasion on July 15. And now comes word of yet another on-screen tribute to what we now call “Jane Austen’s era.” Really, the English Regency hasn’t been this popular since 1820. Naturally, I’m not the first person to notice this recent mini-trend (see here

Seventy-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Leigh-Perrot, who was married to the older brother of Jane Austen’s mother, was by all accounts a difficult and unpleasant woman: domineering, self-involved, and possibly larcenous. Further evidence of Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s character flaws seems to emerge from the letter Jane Austen began writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 217 years ago today (#44 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of

Last year, an Australian octogenarian named Ruth Wilson made headlines when she completed a doctoral degree on Jane Austen and the pedagogy of reading. And now Wilson has expanded and revised her dissertation into a book – a “reading memoir” called The Jane Austen Remedy. I must confess that titles like this – The Jane Austen[Fill in the Blank with Something Self-Help-y] – generally make my heart sink. Too often, what follows is a parade of platitudes, dressed up with superfi

For a long time, we have known that at least one* Janeite lives barely a heartbeat away from the British throne: Seven years ago, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, the wife of Prince Charles, listed Elizabeth Bennet among the literary characters she would most like to be. And last week, additional confirmation of Camilla’s Austen fandom arrived on two fronts. In a short Instagram interview promoting her online book club, Camilla was asked (starting at :41) which five literary ch

Is Jane Austen an essential author? Must all English majors – all readers, even! – get to know her work before they can count themselves among the truly educated? It’s an interesting question, calling for careful consideration of such matters as genre history, literary quality, influence, and popularity, and of what role (if any) race, class, gender, and national identity should play in weighing the relative importance of all of the above. This was not, however, the approach

Last year, as blog readers will recall, a New York fashion designer named Jennyvi Dizon celebrated her newly minted membership in the Jane Austen Society of North America by making a set of Austen-inspired gowns for JASNA members to wear at the Annual General Meeting in Chicago. Now Dizon is creating an entire Austen collection for New York Fashion Week in September, and she’ll offer a sneak peek at her process during an April 30 Zoom event sponsored by JASNA’s Southwest regi

In popular culture, Jane Austen is the avatar of buttoned-up romance – love stories featuring heroines concealed under long skirts and close-fitting bonnets brushing gloved hands with suitors covered head to toe in breeches, waistcoats, and top hats. It’s curious, then, that we can’t seem to stop talking about Regency underwear – the corsets, the chemises, the petticoats, the (lack of) knickers. The latest example of our obsession is “Jane Austen Undressed,” a new exhibit of