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 →
????????????? Forgive my lapse, dear Janeites, as I took a little break due to some Spring Break travel with my elder daughter. I have at this point moved on from P&P and am now working my way through (slogging through) Mansfield Park and yet there's something that has always gotten under my nails when it... Continue Reading →
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 →
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a writer (of no fortune nor fame) reads the work of a venerated author, the writer will have the audacity to suggest better techniques might have been deployed. That's pretty Austentatious, right? Ok, so we will chat about how Austen's first line in this amazing novel is... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
It's a real joy that part of my job involves watching films that I have already watched eight dozen times beofre and will watch again (one assumes) eight dozen more. All hyperbole aside (and it's not that far a stretch, actually), I truly do enjoy watching these films and having now a new frame of... Continue Reading →
No, no literal bodies. Sorry. The only actual death belongs to poor Mr. Dashwood at the beginning and, one assumes, a very dear wish amongst a fair number of characters that Mrs. Ferrars will not be long in following. A great many people engage with Jane Austen via Hollywood. I mean, how many of us... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
A Life in Austen 