For the past week or so, my Google alert has been crowded with versions of the same story: William and Kate—that’s the Prince and Princess of Wales to us commoners—apparently don’t always get along perfectly! Sometimes they fight! They even throw things! From time to time, “he’ll call her ‘darling’ with ‘signs of annoyance’ ”! Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care much about the shocking news that a fortyish couple with high-profile jobs and three children under the age of ten sometime

“Jane Austen’s Birthplace Hits the Market”! “Your chance to live in the beloved author’s treasured family home”! When these headlines popped up on my Google alert last weekend, my first thought was not, “Oh, if only I had a spare £8.5 million (about $10.3 million) to spend on a palatial Hampshire estate.” No, my first thought was, “Jane Austen’s birthplace? What the heck?” Because as Janeites know, the rectory in the English village of Steventon, where Jane Austen was born on

It’s been a long road for fans of Sanditon, the PBS series based, very loosely, on the novel that Jane Austen left unfinished at her death. Heck, it’s been a long road even for those of us who aren’t fans of Sanditon. Over the past three-plus years, we’ve weathered the much-hyped 2019 UK premiere, the underwhelming UK viewer numbers, the controversial unhappy-cliffhanger ending, the series cancellation, the subsequent US broadcast, the intense lobbying by a passionate fanbase

Eighty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Janeites take the lives of Jane Austen’s characters very, very seriously. Not for nothing did the Republic of Pemberley invent a special acronym–ENASUTH, short for Edmund Needs A Slap Upside The Head--to facilitate conversations about the problematic behavior of one particular Austen hero. The fact that Edmund Bertram is not, in fact, a real person seemed entirely beside the point. This way of thinki

Over the past three years, the indefatigable Jane Austen & Co. has convened four smart and provocative online lecture series about Austen’s life and times, including ground-breaking examinations of race in the Regency. Their newest series, “Everyday Science in the Regency,” kicks off next Tuesday evening, with a talk by Chawton House chief executive Katie Childs on the role of women in horticulture and botany, the subject of a 2022 Chawton House exhibit. Later this month, a U

As a writer who is also a fan of period drama, I pay attention to the screenwriting credits on my favorite literary-minded TV adaptations. And up there with the revered Andrew Davies—screenwriter of the BBC’s iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, among many other projects—I would rank Sandy Welch. Welch gave us the insightful 2009 version of Austen’s Emma, the touching 2006 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the to-die-for 2004 miniseries of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North

Back in 2017, Jane Austen’s birthplace, the Hampshire village of Steventon, marked the bicentennial of her death by converting a disused red telephone box into an Austen-themed book exchange site. I can’t find any evidence that I blogged about this charming project when it happened, so I was glad to be reminded of it recently by an item in the online travel site Atlas Obscura. According to the post, the phone box—one of a type that hasn’t been installed in the UK in more than