Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly created plenty of unforgettably monstrous people. Herewith, my nominees for the Five Scariest Characters in Jane Austen, in ascending order of evil: 5. Emma Woodhouse (Emma) A world-class manipulator--“Do not imagine that I want to influence you," she insists to Harriet, while attempting to influence her—whose eventual reform can’t erase ou

Like most writers, Jane Austen was a reader, avidly consuming the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose of her day. Her letters offer tantalizing glimpses of her reactions (for instance, here and here), and her novels paint portraits of heroines who read: Catherine Morland devours Anne Radcliffe, Marianne Dashwood swoons over Cowper, and Anne Elliot justly appreciates Scott and Byron. So it’s welcome news that the North Carolina public humanities collaborative Jane Austen &

Eightieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Nowadays, an unpublished writer can upload her as-yet-unappreciated work to the cloud, keeping her words safe and secure even as she moves from garret to garret. Imagine how much harder it must have been for Jane Austen, who toted hundreds of pages of unknown masterworks through a wide swath of southern England across eight years and multiple household moves. Imagine how easily Pride and Prejudice could

This fall and winter, every Janeite workweek starts with “Austen Monday”—the evening on which the Rosenbach, Philadelphia’s museum and rare-book library, airs the latest episode of its deep dive into Pride and Prejudice. Each week of the six-month-long YouTube program, host Edward G. Pettit, the Rosenbach’s manager of public programs, will interview an Austen specialist of one kind or another and then discuss the week’s installment of P&P with a rotating cast of co-hosts. (Re

People who hate Jane Austen – yes, such benighted folks do exist – sometimes claim that she is so-o-o boring that she causes eyelids to droop. The now-defunct blog Bad Reviews of Good Books, which compiled excerpts from you-know-what,* offered some choice morsels: “I have fallen asleep EVERY TIME I have read it” (Persuasion); “Austen only appealed to me when I needed something to help me fall asleep” (Pride and Prejudice). So I was amused when I ran across a reference to Jane

The smashing success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has ushered in a new era of multiracial casting in Regency costume dramas. This is good news, not least because it means that a British actor as good as Zawe Ashton can play an Emma-esque supporting role in last summer’s uneven Regency romcom Mr. Malcolm’s List and steal the movie right out from under the nose of its insipid lead. Turns out we’ve got another reason to like Ashton: According to an interview earlier this year with th

For Janeites, the Austen First Edition Thrill-o-Meter is calibrated something like this: Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned by Austen herself Second-Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned by someone Austen knew Third-Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned by someone kind of cool Fourth-Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition Books in the third and fourth of these categories come on the market with some regularity, as blog readers will r

Janeites first discover Jane Austen at different moments in their lives. I’ve talked with people who read her first in a high school or college class, or who found their way to her in middle age, perhaps by way of a movie adaptation. Bookish girls, especially, seem to stumble across her around the age of twelve, give or take a year or so. And then there are outliers like Rory Stewart, a Brit with the kind of eclectic resume—soldier, diplomat, adventurer, politician, professor

We all read Jane Austen for different reasons. (I wrote a whole book about this phenomenon.) Some read her for the lucidity of her language. Others read her for the vividness of her characterizations. And still others read her for the excellence of her insights into business management. Or so we’re apparently supposed to conclude from a recent piece in Psychology Today that discussed the literary interests of Peter Drucker, the revered twentieth-century guru of management con