Thirty-nine years ago, during my first semester of college, I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia to attend my first Jane Austen Society of North America Annual General Meeting—the fifth JASNA AGM, centered on Emma. At seventeen, I was the youngest Janeite there.* I adored every minute of the weekend. As far as I was concerned, all the scholarly lectures were brilliant, all the group discussions were stimulating, and all the food was delicious. On Sunday night, I re

Over the summer, when Janeites weren’t arguing about the controversial new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, many were praising the Austen update that was screening over on Hulu: Fire Island, which translated Pride and Prejudice into a contemporary same-sex romance. I had mixed feelings about Fire Island, with its hectic plot mechanics and its overreliance on soft-focus montage to build its central romantic relationship. But the movie has a good heart, some funny moments, and

MGM’s 1940 movie of Pride and Prejudice was the first screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and with its Victorian fashions, truncated plot, and cuddly Lady Catherine, it’s not universally beloved among Janeites. But the death earlier this month of actor Marsha Hunt – at 104, the last survivor among the major cast members -- nevertheless marks a milestone: Austen adaptations have finally been around long enough to outlast all the human beings who created them. Hunt, who p

A few months ago, I noted that the British royal family appears to include a critical mass of women who are crazy about Jane Austen. (Or so they say.) If only I had known that this fandom extended all the way to the top. In a recent photo essay detailing the childhood of the future Queen Elizabeth II, Vogue noted that the young princess “scheduled an hour for reading each day, working through classics by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.” (Scroll down to #14) Admittedly, this

The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were problematic: A statue erected in her honor in London in 2020 was widely panned. The newest Wollstonecraft-related fundraiser seems far less likely to generate controversy, since it concerns not a piece of public art but a book – a first edition of Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works, compiled after her death in 1797 by her grieving widower, William G

Nine months have passed since we learned the happy news that a cache of priceless books and manuscripts, including two Jane Austen letters, had been purchased by a consortium of public institutions in Britain, rather than dispersed into private hands. And now those Austen letters -- #2 and #87 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence -- are on display through March 5 at Jane Austen’s House, as the centerpieces of mini-exhibitions entitled “Jane Austen

From time to time, a particular news item brings a snippet of Jane Austen’s wisdom forcibly to mind – such a snippet as, say, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” And so it was for me the other day when I learned for the first time about the Oregon State Fair’s very, very popular . . . table-setting competition. Every year, it seems, the twenty teams or individuals lucky enough to survive the fair’s cutthroat first-come-first-served registrati

Last week, a beautiful young woman ended her longstanding romantic relationship with a good-looking guy old enough to be her father. Or perhaps he ended it. Anyway, they broke up. Why should we care? No reason, really, but the internet was very, very interested nonetheless, because the aforementioned older man is named Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio – acclaimed actor, Oscar winner, former youthful heartthrob -- has reportedly never dated any woman over the age of twenty-five, ev

Seventy-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In December of 1775, the Rev. George Austen wrote to a relative announcing the birth of his seventh child -- a girl who would be, he predicted, “a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion.” The father’s vision of the future came true, for Jane Austen adored her only sister, Cassandra, nearly three years older. When they were children, according to their nephew James Edward Auste