No selfie sticks were anywhere in sight.   On an overcast afternoon last week, Winchester Cathedral unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Jane Austen in its Inner Close, bringing an end to seven years of hilariously overblown controversy .   The cathedral filmed the event, and several people in the audience raised their cellphones to record it. But predictions that installing an Austen statue would turn the tranquil site into a “Disneyland-on-Itchen” overrun by hordes of se

A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...

It’s coming up on chain-yourself-to-the-bulldozers time for the vocal—but possibly small—band of folks opposed to the erection of a Jane...

Dust off those selfie sticks, Janeites: Winchester Cathedral is moving ahead with its controversial plan to place a statue of Jane Austen...

As an Anglophile happily married to a Brit, I say this with love: Sometimes the English are just so adorably, hilariously. . . English ....

Exactly five years ago, Winchester Cathedral proposed erecting a statue of Jane Austen in the Cathedral Close, in tribute to the most...

Some years ago – six? Ten? – I stumbled across a mention of an intriguing campaign to raise money for a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, to...

Is it possible to have too much Jane Austen? Apparently, the good citizens of Winchester, England, think it is. Last fall, Winchester...

Eighteen months ago, not a single statue of Jane Austen was on public display anywhere in the world. And now, it appears, we will soon...