Your online source for Jane Austen and her legacy
From the desk of Katie Patchell For all its stylistic elegance and its iron-backboned heroine, Mansfield Park is the black sheep of the Jane Austen canon. It’s the book most likely to be placed at the bottom of “Which is your favorite Austen novel?” polls. Public opinion hovers somewhere between “That’s a book by Jane... Continue Reading →
It’s Halloween today—the best day of the year to celebrate Gothic and paranormal fiction inspired by Jane Austen. Gothic fiction was a big hit in the late 1700’s. Authors like Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Romance of the Forest (1791) influenced and inspired a... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Lisa Galek: There are tons of ways to flirt… and just as many ways to break hearts in the process. A casual smile or a wink can lead to long-awaited romance or lots of unwanted attention. Claire LaZebnik explores all this and more in The Trouble with Flirting, her contemporary young... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Lisa Galek: If you are one of those Austen fans who think it’s a shame that Mansfield Park is so rarely adapted for modern audiences, then The Beresfords will be a welcome addition to your reading list. When six-year-old Frannie Price is removed from the care of her drug-addicted mother and... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Christina Boyd: Lily Berry is a needy, desperately unhappy dreamer who after reading “The Six” (Jane Austen’s six major works) has let her affection for dear Jane run wild—reading and re-reading the novels, and chronically sabotaging her personal life by “squeezing herself into undersized romances.” She finds herself at an all-time... Continue Reading →
Mansfield Park is considered (by some) to be the dark horse of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and her heroine Fanny Price intolerable. Poor Fanny. She really gets the bum’s rush in Austenland. The patron saint of the weak, insipid and downtrodden, she is Jane Austen’s most misunderstood heroine. In fact, many dispute if she is the... Continue Reading →
