Christmas barely registers in Jane Austen’s novels: Only three of them— Emma , Mansfield Park , and Persuasion —include true Christmas-time scenes.   Still, the holiday comes in for occasional mentions in the other three novels as well, and nowhere more amusingly than in Northanger Abbey , when the insincere and self-absorbed Isabella Thorpe, newly engaged to Catherine Morland’s brother James, recalls the delights of the previous year’s noel:   “You are so like your dear brot

The Jane Austen's Desk online platform seeks crowdfunding to move the project forward in the absence of NEH funding.

In her lifetime, Jane Austen may not have been as famous and revered as she deserved to be. But in death, she’s making up for lost time.   Case in point: The BBC’s talk-radio programming schedule for the next two weeks, which looks, if you squint, like All Austen, All The Time .   The soft opening took place back in early November, with the Radio 4 broadcast of a new two-part adaptation of Northanger Abbey.  Over the weekend, the channel’s digital counterpart, Radio 4Extra, a

Turkey makes an appearance in more than one of Jane Austen’s completed novels—and, it turns out, in one of the unfinished ones, as well.   Given the fraught nature of Thanksgiving guest lists, perhaps it’s appropriate that this passage from The Watsons , the novel Austen abandoned around 1805, is also the tale of a guest from hell: Jane Watson, the sister-in-law of heroine Emma Watson. Like Emma ’s Mrs. Elton, Jane Watson is a pretentious social climber masquerading, hilario

Does the world need another Jane Austen podcast? Color me skeptical.   A rummage through Google and memory turned up eighteen non-fiction examples of the genre, and I doubt I found them all. There are podcasts sponsored by mainline Austen organizations, including Chawton House , Jane Austen’s House , and the Jane Austen Society of North America . There are podcasts devoted to excavating historical context , or dissecting Austen adaptations , or both . There are podcasts hoste

Jane Austen “is on course to have her best year since 2009,” the UK publishing industry magazine The Bookseller reported recently. “In...

This week, British Janeites were treated to a new TV docudrama/literary-historical-biographical analysis/250th birthday tribute called...

When I’m asked which Jane Austen novel is my favorite—and if you write a book about Jane Austen fandom, you will be asked this question...

“Name your favorite Jane Austen character”--along with its offshoots (favorite hero, favorite bad boy, Which Jane Austen Heroine Are...

We Janeites never tire of pointing out all the qualities that make Austen special. We’re not wrong to do so--few writers are as good as...

Do Kids These Days need to be coaxed into picking up a book? What with their new-fangled BookTok and #bookstagram, they seem to be doing...

Ninety-ninth in an occasional series  of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.   Exactly 226 years ago today, the 23-year-old Jane Austen...