The appetite for Jane Austen-adjacent content never seems to flag, at least in the Anglophiliac precincts of PBS. If you ate up Season Two of Sanditon and can’t wait until the airing of Season Three, you have yet more to look forward to: Last week, the network announced that Masterpiece is developing a four-hour adaptation of Gill Hornby’s 2020 novel Miss Austen, with a script by Scottish screenwriter Andrea Gibb. The book centers on the elder Austen sister, Cassandra, offeri

During an overseas visit earlier this month, I was too swamped with family business to follow the news with my usual attention. This state of affairs proved curiously restful. For a week or so, I could shut out the usual drumbeat of doom: brutal warfare, polarized politics, skyrocketing inflation, controversial Jane Austen adaptations. . . . But now I’m back, and the time for ignoring reality has passed. Yes, I’ve watched The Trailer. And no, I am not pleased. I refer, of cou

When I was a kid, I – or perhaps my sister -- owned a novelty pen bearing an image of Botticelli’s Venus in a bathing suit. (Or was it a strategically positioned giant seashell? Can’t remember now. The mists of time are thick.) In any case, when you tipped the pen sideways, the suit/shell slid away, revealing the naked goddess in all her painted glory. It is, no doubt, a sign of my perversity that this creepy toy came to mind recently when I happened across the “Jane Austen’s

Seven years ago, we learned that Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall – aka the wife of Prince Charles and future queen consort of England – is a Jane Austen fan. Two years ago, we learned that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge -- aka the wife of Prince William and future queen consort of England – is also a Jane Austen fan, or at least a person who keeps attractively bound Austen editions on her desk during photo shoots. And now it turns out that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York – aka

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, as Britain’s Queen Victoria marked a milestone sixty years on the throne, the proprietors of Chawton House – then an Elizabethan mansion presided over by descendants of Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight -- planted a copse of trees to commemorate the occasion. This month, Queen Elizabeth II reached the even more impressive milestone of seventy years on the throne, and the proprietors of Chawton House – now a combination of research libr

To Janeites – indeed, to anyone who’s read semi-widely and who isn’t V.S. Naipaul – it’s obvious that women are capable of writing great novels. Have written quite a lot of them, in fact, and are still turning them out by the dozens. And yet, many boys and men still balk at picking up a book with a female name on the cover. Thus it was that the Guardian decided, ahead of Wednesday’s announcement of the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, to ask a number of male r

If you’re a Janeite who can’t make it to Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art this summer – and will therefore miss your chance for an in-person look at dozens of costumes from iconic Jane Austen screen adaptations – you may want to check out a museum spokeswoman’s recent local TV appearance. The chitchat is bland, but the visuals comprise closeups of items included in the traveling exhibit, “Jane Austen: Fashion & Sensibility,” which features nearly fifty costumes from eight scre

Seventy-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s novels famously contain few detailed descriptions of clothing, houses, or furniture, and relatively few of Austen’s own possessions survive. As a result, every glimpse of the material culture of her time can feel like a tiny epiphany. So it is that a certain frisson accompanies our reading of the letter that Austen wrote exactly 211 years ago today, in which she gives her sister, Cassa

The zeitgeist is a peculiar thing. For decades – centuries, even – almost nobody makes a Pride and Prejudice update centered on same-sex romance. And then suddenly, in the spring of 2022, we get two at the same time. Tomorrow, of course, Hulu is premiering the long-aborning Fire Island, a feature film that updates our familiar tale to a group of friends vacationing on New York’s eponymous gay mecca, under the wing of a lesbian matriarch played by Margaret Cho. Early reviews (