Earlier this month, the Telegraph reported that, in reissuing books by the beloved-but-controversial children’s writer Roald Dahl, his publisher had . . . smoothed some rough edges. Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, had quietly altered language deemed out of step with contemporary sensibilities concerning such matters as disability, mental illness, body size, and gender. Cue predictable outrage over censorship! woke police! cancel culture! Even Queen Camilla w

From time to time, my Google alert brings me word of Janeites I’ll never get to meet--fellow travelers who have passed on, leaving behind loving relatives with fond memories of their Austen fandom. And thus it is that I learned recently about one Susan Smarr, a retired teacher who died in Arizona last month, at the age of seventy-seven. “Susan was an avid reader and was rarely seen without a book in hand,” her online obituary says. Which books she chose can be inferred from a

In a world with so many books and so little time, reading recommendations--from critics, bloggers, celebrity talk-show hosts, friends–provide a handy tool for cutting through the cultural noise to find the next page-turner. And of course I nod approvingly whenever Jane Austen turns up on those lists, as she’s been doing recently: * Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Guardian asked eleven writers, plus the actor Stanley Tucci, to pick their “favorite romcom books.” The mill

A few weeks ago, the British press was suddenly awash in articles (for example, here, here and here) about the new! exciting! previously unsuspected! phenomenon of Jane Austen memes. For those of us who pay a lot of attention—or, really, any attention at all—to Austen’s online fandom, it was not exactly news that young Janeites enjoy pairing stills from Austen screen adaptations with clever captions. Nor was the research on which these stories were based exactly hot off the p

In my junior year of college, the assigned reading for my women’s studies class included Gloria Naylor’s 1982 novel The Women of Brewster Place. Finishing the book in my dorm room late one night, I came across a powerfully written, brutally explicit scene of gang rape. Deeply shaken, I couldn’t sleep for hours afterwards. Nowadays, if Naylor’s book were on a college syllabus, it might well come with a trigger warning—a label alerting students to content that might reawaken bu

When Karl Marx wrote about the decadence of capitalism, he may have been imagining something like our current moment, in which a slew of publications (for instance, here, here, and here) write about a fifteen-second trailer that a company has produced to promote a thirty-second commercial advertising a platform that allows people to get money back on purchases they make using electronic devices they can activate around the clock, without ever leaving home. The only thing Marx

Last month, noting the pending release of a Pride and Prejudice screen update entitled Townhouse Confidential, I reported, “My expectations are rock-bottom.” But I’m a Jane Austen video completist, and so last week, I donated $5.32 to the Bezos children's college fund, gathered up a drink and a snack, and sat down to stream the movie. And . . . it appears that my expectations weren’t low enough. Based on the unpromising trailer, I had expected Townhouse Confidential to be pre

Ten years ago this weekend, I published my first blog post—the first of many, as it turned out. (Today’s entry is #1,049, if you’re keeping score at home.) Appropriately enough, that first post also concerned an anniversary--the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. And of course I seized the opportunity to plug my then-forthcoming book Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. (If you bought a copy, many thanks.) In