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

Emma Woodhouse’s Christmas holiday is not a good one, as readers of Emma will recall: On Christmas Eve, she fends off Mr. Elton’s...

It’s a tough year for traditional Christmas celebrations. The eight maids are a-milking in masks. The ten lords are a-leaping six feet...

Tomorrow is Christmas, the day on which a larger-than-life personage employing semi-equine transport suddenly appears in our homes,...

For those of us with school-age children, Christmas week provides a delightful break from the rhythms of the academic calendar: No rising...

Despite the New York Times’ efforts to persuade us otherwise, Jane Austen is not a Christmassy writer. It’s true that the word...

If you are a Janeite with no 2016 Christmas plans – and a whole wad of cash left over from this year’s gift shopping – the New York Times...

Jane Austen is famously careful about the chronology in her stories – Ellen Moody has mined the text to produce working calendars for all...