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

British screenwriter Andrew Davies turned eighty-nine last month, but he’s not slowing down. Quite the reverse.   Over the past six weeks, Davies—the author of four well-known TV adaptations of Austen novels, including the BBC’s iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice -- has begun talking publicly about his next projects. Apparently, he’s working on three new Austen spinoffs—and hoo boy, they sound like doozies. Next to this stuff, Mr. Darcy’s wet shirt practically qualifies as abje

In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s....

A year ago, I confidently predicted a 2020 filled with the usual array of Austen events: “Teas, balls, fairs, festivals, conferences,...

Among the Janeite casualties of pandemic lockdown was the planned West End production of The Watsons, Laura Wade’s much-praised...

For those of us who love our Jane Austen adaptations, the coronavirus quarantine has been the best of times and the worst of times. The...

The year that began yesterday will not bring us any important Jane Austen anniversaries: The bicentenaries of her death and of the...

The Janeite word of the moment, it would appear, is “fragment.” * Last week, Jane Austen’s House Museum launched an urgent appeal for...

The Watsons -- the novel Jane Austen began, probably in 1804, but never finished -- is a fascinating fragment. It’s bleak and wintry,...

Great news for aficionados of Jane Austen fan fiction: the long-inaccessible third volume of The Younger Sister, by Austen’s niece...

The library gods are smiling upon us Janeites. As I reported in my recently completed Watsons in Winter blog series, Jane Austen’s...

“Each of us has a private Austen,” Karen Joy Fowler writes at the beginning of The Jane Austen Book Club, her 2004 novel about how...