This year we commemorate Jane Austen’s death. We certainly do not celebrate it. We feel a sense of unfairness about it, not only for our selfish sake–for being cheated out of, based on the lifespan of her parents and most of her siblings, thirty or forty years’ worth of Jane Austen novels–but naturally for Jane’s own sake. She died just before she would have reached real success–the success enjoyed by her contemporaries such as Burney, Radcliffe, and Edgeworth, all of whom she has utterly eclipsed in the intervening centuries. It is just horribly unfair. Jane gave the world such joy and never really had the opportunity to enjoy real fruits from her labor (by which we mean money. From what we can tell, Austen was never big on the whole adulation thing).

We also have great affection for time-travel stories, but within certain parameters. The method of time travel must…

I want to thank JASNA-Vermont for inviting me to speak at their June gathering yesterday – and for dipping with me in the waters of RESEARCH into the family of the Austens. So little time, so MUCH information! My illustrated talk entitled “The Mystery of Emma Austen’s Aunt Emma” was an “interactive” presentation – and people really spoke up, made observations, added comments, asked questions. It was GREAT! Later, one audience member even told me my “research reads like a thrilling mystery!” Heartening words, indeed. No one can ever guess the “desert” a writer *feels* to be stranded in, when the research is this intensive and taking years to produce something substantive.

I figure I’m closing in on a THOUSAND letters and several HUNDRED diaries – and more turns up. I just returned (after midnight, last friday…) from a research jaunt to New York City.

Very helpful staff at NYU…

Michelle has done so much justice to our JASNA AGM experience in Minneapolis, it’s not even funny. It was an amazing four days away from it all—so much so that we didn’t even usually bother to stop and recall that we were, indeed, away from it all. We were just there, immersed in all things Austen, all things Pride and Prejudice, and it was great.

Like Michelle, I came away with two things at the forefront of my mind: 1) I am only a fan and avid reader and lover of Jane Austen; I do not approach the level of serious, scholarly, and academic thought that goes into a real and deep study of her novels, although I desperately admire it and have just enough knowledge to be excited by it; and 2) Jane Austen is even more awesome than I realized. I suppose we’ve become…

It’s been five days since our reentry into the 21st century and everyday lives. For three days, Friday, September 27 – Sunday, September 29, Sarah and I joined 750 other readers to talk about one author, and just one of her books: Jane Austen’s “own darling child” Pride & Prejudice. To sit in a full convention hall to celebrate one woman and her book, 200 years old this year, was a marvel. And yet, after listening to plenary speaker, John Mullan, on “Speechless in Pride & Prejudice,” almost 800 people didn’t seem at all out of bounds for such a subject. I came away loving Jane even more, something I didn’t think was possible.

At home, I’m the trivia nut, and have even been accused of being “obsessed” with Jane Austen. Folks, I was nothing compared to this crowd. Mullan opened up his talk with a trivia question…

Guest post by Janine Barchas

Today marks the start of the annual gathering of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), hosted this year in Minneapolis. This particular meeting celebrates the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice (first published in 1813) with the pomp that is due this standout literary favorite, including workshops, exhibits, lectures, readings, and, of course, a Regency-style ball. Because I recently published a book about Jane Austen as a consummate name-dropper and participant in early celebrity culture, I was invited to speak to JASNA members about the celebrity currency of the names in Pride and Prejudice .

This post is a sneak peek into the new research that I will be sharing with JASNA members about how specific surnames and locations in Pride and Prejudice slyly point to the ancestral home of the real-world Fitzwilliam and Darcy families—directing a reader’s encounter with the fictional estate of…

Smith&GoslingThe biography A Memoir of Jane Austen, compiled by her nephew James Edward Austen Leigh, was first published in 1870 (2nd edition on google.books). In 1911, daughter Mary Augusta Austen Leigh wrote down Edward’s own life history. Two Teens in the Time of Austen dramatizes events in the lives of Edward’s beloved wife Emma Smith (1801-1876) and her friend and sister-in-law Mary Gosling (1800-1842).

It is Emma’s eventual connection to the Austens of Steventon which gives this project its very name!  (The fact that the diaries of both girls begin in the period that saw Austen’s publications, doesn’t hurt either.)  Celebrate with me five years of uncovering the lives of the Smiths & Goslings. You can even “click to Look Inside“. Lightly edited, and highly rearranged, “Random Jottings” (estimated at 170 pages) serves as an introduction to the world of my Two Teens from posts published…

Hot off the presses is the November/December 2012 (No 60) edition of Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, the ultimate Austen reading indulgence. Here are the featured articles!

• Some great Christmas gift ideas for the Jane Austen fan in your life
• You shall go to the dance – public and private balls in Jane Austen’s time
• How keeping a bawdyhouse could be a tough business
• Baiting, coursing and fishing: blood sports were big business in the Georgian era
• Looking at Jane’s use of fashion accessories in Emma
• The life of Sir Thomas Bernard, a prominent philanthropist
• Jane in the Garden of England

This new issue also includes reports from the recent Jane Austen Festival in Bath and the JASNA AGM in Brooklyn; news, letters, book reviews and much, much more!

Need a seasonal gift?

A subscription to Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine is the perfect gift for friends and family who…