We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new. Now’s your chance to test that proposition: The Rosenbach, Philadelphia’s venerable museum and rare-book library, is hosting an online Austen series that will spend a full six months examining Pride and Prejudice, a few chapters at a time. The series, “Austen Mondays,” will air on YouTube from 7-8:30 pm (US Eastern), beginning on September 19

The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice turns up everywhere, most commonly a) when a journalist who doesn’t know much about Jane Austen has to produce a story about her and thinks, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be clever to start this piece with a reference to her most famous line?” or b) when a journalist who wants to add a touch of class to a story that has nothing to do with Jane Austen thinks, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be clever to start this piece by riffing on the famous opening sentence

Early last Tuesday morning, I opened up my phone to Wordle, the now-famous daily word-finding puzzle, and typed my usual starting guess: LOVER. A few minutes and three more guesses later, I had the answer – the seventy-seventh consecutive time I had guessed Wordle’s mystery five-letter word within the permitted six turns. A four-guess day is decidedly average in the Wordleverse, but I’ll take my microscopic self-esteem boosts where I can get them. Then later in the afternoon,

Seventy-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. “Write what you know,” aspiring authors are counseled in MFA workshops the world over. Apparently, that advice is centuries old. Or so we might conclude after reading the letter that Jane Austen finished writing to her niece Anna Austen Lefroy exactly 208 years ago today (#104 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). Anna, then twenty-one, was at work on a novel titled Whi

Attention, bargain hunters! Five years ago, you would have needed £9 million (about $11 million) to buy Luckington Court, the Cotswolds estate that played the Bennet family home of Longbourn in the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. But the house was quickly withdrawn from the market, amid rumors that the soon-to-be-married Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were considering the purchase. The royal couple passed on the deal, and apparently everyone else did, too

It’s never a bad time to talk about Persuasion–really, what are you doing that’s more important?--but right now may be an especially good time to discuss Jane Austen’s last completed novel. See, a new screen adaptation just premiered on Netflix! Maybe you haven’t heard? Assuming you’re not exhausted from all those conversations you’ve been having about whether the new adaptation is a fresh, modern take on Austen’s deathless masterpiece or a travesty that should be buried with

As we Janeites know to our sorrow, only 160 of Jane Austen’s letters survive, and some of those are filled with details that mean little to us now -- references to private jokes, mysterious events, and unidentified acquaintances, with all context lost to the ravages of time. So it’s hard not to sigh with jealousy over the news that the Huntington Library in Southern California has recently acquired an annotated archive of nearly four hundred letters exchanged among members of

Jane Austen never wrote a sequel. Among her many excellent qualities was a sure sense of when to leave well enough alone. Alas, too many people who have made movies based on her work don’t seem to have learned the same lesson. Recent reports suggest we may soon see new installments of two Austen-inspired series that overstayed their welcome long ago: * Earlier this summer, Ryan Paevey, the blandly handsome star of Hallmark’s dreadful “Mr. Darcy” movies – Unleashing Mr. Darcy,

Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and sometimes not even that. This reticence leaves readers free to imagine that Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood looks like. . . a Bratz doll. Or so we might conclude from a recent Buzzfeed piece contributed by a community member who goes by books_baking_broadway and headlined, “We Used AI To Show What Jane Austen Characters Would Look Like I