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

One hundred and fifth in an occasional series  of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.   How many marriage proposals did Jane Austen turn down?   The story of poor Harris Bigg-Wither, whose December 1802 proposal Austen accepted and then rejected the next day, is reasonably well-documented. Austen’s niece Caroline heard the story from her mother, who witnessed the aftermath, and years later, Caroline shared the details with her brother, James Edward Austen-Leigh, as he worked

Ninety-eighth in an occasional series  of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.   Mary Lloyd was a friend of Jane and Cassandra Austen...

In his 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen , the author’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, reports that his famous aunt “was successful in...

Does Jane Austen owe her fame to an excellent publicist? The legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein says yes—or at least maybe—in a recent LitHub...

Today, it’s called the slush pile: the tottering heap of unsolicited manuscripts that clog the mailboxes—these days, the email boxes—of...

Sixty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote...

Even before the coronavirus curtailed recreational travel, the Internet-assisted ogling of Jane Austen-adjacent real estate was one of...

Fifty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s an occupational hazard of the writing life that once...

Forty-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s brothers were a reproductively prolific lot, at...

Forty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In May of 1817, the gravely ill Jane Austen left her home...

Fortieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s not always easy to tell when Jane Austen, master of irony,...