When I was growing up in 1970s and -80s heartland America, my taste for classic literature, including Jane Austen, made me . . . well, I liked to think it made me special. Unique, even. Defiantly superior to all those kids who scorned me for my nerdiness. Today, it seems, I’d be so ordinary as to verge on cliché. Or so I concluded after happening across a recent newspaper interview with Miranda Cowley Heller, a former TV executive who wrote the 2021 novel The Paper Palace, a

Seventy-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. How autobiographical is Jane Austen’s writing? Impossible to say for sure, given how fragmentary is our knowledge of both Austen’s life and Austen’s writing process. The question comes into sharp relief, however, when we consider the letter that the 25-year-old Austen began writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 221 years ago today (#36 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspond

May already! Practically swimsuit season – and thus a perfect time to check out the latest news about the two beachiest Jane Austen spinoffs: * Last week, Searchlight Pictures released its first trailer for Fire Island, the same-sex update of Pride and Prejudice that will arrive on Hulu on June 3. Judging from the nearly four million YouTube views the trailer had racked up a mere three days after dropping, many people – or at least many bots -- are hungry for a gay romcom wit

Back in 2016, the BBC interviewed a young Syrian woman sheltering at home during the government’s brutal bombing of the city of Aleppo. To keep herself sane, she was reading Jane Austen. “I spend the long nights at home reading,” said the woman, identified only as Bassma. “I’ve read Austen and all the classics so I don’t have to think just about the war. I travel in my thoughts to another period, another time, and it really helped.” Last week, Agence France-Presse interviewed

You’ve heard it before: Modern men can’t measure up to Jane Austen’s heroes. Straight, female Janeites are hooked on impossible fantasies. Hey, girl: If none of the guys you meet seems good enough, stop looking for Mr. Darcy already! As I’ve noted in the past, this Jane-Austen-raises-unrealistic-romantic-expectations meme – call it the Austenland Trope -- ignores the evidence of Austen’s actual books, which are not to be confused with the far swoonier movies based on them. St