A Star Has Fallen

On July 18, 1817, a Friday, Jane Austen passed away, her head cradled on a pillow on her sister Cassandra's lap. It was four o'clock in the morning. Jane Austen was 41 years old when she died, the age I am now. In fact, Jane and my own birthdays are separated by a month -... Continue Reading →

The Cost of Lost Communication

As someone who has read Austen multiple times (at this point, I can't even remember how many!), something that strikes me each time are the different themes and concepts I connect to. Over the years, I have gone from being a teenage, heterosexual reader of Austen to a (slightly) more mature college student questioning everything... Continue Reading →

Questions of Inequality in Austen

I began reading Jane Austen as a high school student in an honors English class. As a white woman from an upper-middle class family, I have been the recipient of a great deal of generational opportunity and privilege, as did Austen herself. And I do know it. While I am grateful for the opportunities I... Continue Reading →

Wrapping up Sense & Sensibility

I have finished Sense & Sensibility. Everyone is happy and gay, including the undeserving Willoughby and Lucy Steele, as well as their rich and greedy relatives. Austen's novels provide her main characters with a happy ending, but rarely do the bad characters experience a comeuppance...rather like real life. I had intended to end this exploration... Continue Reading →

Sense & Sensibility – Pt. 1: Inheritance

As I begin my journey through the published novels of Jane Austen, the first stop is Sense & Sensibility. As with so many of these novels, the conflict to the heroines is immediately introduced through the problems of inheritance. The Dashwood women, Elinor and Marianne in particular, are children of a second marriage, and this... Continue Reading →

It all begins today…

Today is my 41st birthday. Today, I begin the year in my own life that was to be the final year of Jane Austen's, and this year alone, this one single year, is the entire reason for this blog. Come with me back in time, some 10 years ago (after returning from the trip shown... Continue Reading →

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