Beneath the romantic stories of love and longing surges an undercurrent of frustration and anger over the many ways in which women were dismissed and discarded by society during Jane Austen’s life.  T...

Were Jane Austen’s sometimes comical and often less than flattering observations about the clergy merely a plot device to amuse us, or was there an undercurrent that revealed the impact of “the living...

I am compelled to amend my blog post from February 2024, “Was Jane Austen a Closet Abolitionist?”, based on discovering Helena Kelly’s exceptional book, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.  Kelly, an Oxf...

Google’s quiet removal of cultural events from their calendars last year is part of a broader trend of tech companies and businesses catering to far-right and extreme groups by rolling back inclusivit...

Financial insecurity can define a person’s life in any era.  For some it may be overcome through good fortune or hard work, for others the struggle may follow them throughout their lifetime.  As fate ...

Holiday traditions in Jane Austen’s time were quite different from our own.  Christmas trees didn’t become common place until the Victorian era. No doubt her family made the traditional Christmas pudding with family members taking turns stirring the currants, sugar, spices, suet, and egg mixture to be steamed and served as the grand finale to the holiday meal.  Balls were a vital component to add felicity to the season by bringing friends and neighbors together for music and dancing.  Jane wrote

I was both delighted and dismayed to see the news that the late, great author, Hilary Mantel, was working on a mash-up of Jane Austen’s novels at the time of her death at age 70 in September of 2022. ...

A new exhibition at the author's home in Chawton, which has never previously displayed all six first-edition books together, is part of preparations for the author's 250th birthday celebrations

(Note to readers: This post has been amended to include Henry Crawford.)Enter Henry Tilney when ingenue Catherine Moreland attends her first ball in Bath but lacks proper introductions and is relegat...