Author: collinshemingway

  • Military Owes Jane; Janeites Owe Military

    Military Owes Jane; Janeites Owe Military

    Last month, we explored the way the Napoleonic Wars affected Jane Austen’s family and how her novels were viewed by readers during the world wars of the twentieth century. This month, we’ll drill a little deeper and go a little wider. Austen’s novels might be said to have participated directly in World War II. Some…

  • Austen Connections to Military

    Writing during the week of July 4, which celebrates American independence hard won by a ragtag army against the superior British military, I naturally return to a topic I’ve visited before, which is Jane Austen’s connection to the military. Both in her life and in her posterity. I have written of Austen in this regard…

  • First and Last of Mary Shelley’s Humankind

    First and Last of Mary Shelley’s Humankind

    Mary Shelley holds the distinction of having written—two hundred years ago—the story of the first of a new kind of human, who is created and animated by science, and the last of the old order of humanity, which is felled by a pandemic. The first novel, her well-known Frankenstein (1818), invented the science-fiction genre. The…

  • Fiction Experience Drives Austen Analysis

    Fiction Experience Drives Austen Analysis

    My new book on Jane Austen’s development as a writer descends directly from my historical fiction trilogy based on Austen’s life. That series, published successively in 2015, 2016, and 2017, imagines a plausible life for Austen during her mid-twenties to early thirties, a period of which we know virtually nothing. The Marriage of Miss Jane…

  • Cover Reveal for Austen’s Creative Development

    Cover Reveal for Austen’s Creative Development

    I’m pleased to announce today the cover reveal for my new book on Jane Austen’s creative process and her development as a writer. The nonfiction book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a “Style Entirely New,” can also be pre-ordered now from Jane Austen Books. It will be available in…

  • Final Look at Austen Books, Military

    Final Look at Austen Books, Military

    I didn’t intend to write multiple times on inexpensive Austen books, particularly those produced for the modern military. But it turns out this is the third and final effort at the topic. … Because Jane Austen was generally well received by the scholarly community from early on, beginning with Sir Walter Scott, it is easy…

  • ‘Friendly Companionship’ in ‘Terrible Environment’

    ‘Friendly Companionship’ in ‘Terrible Environment’

    In a recent blog, we saw the importance of books to soldiers in the field during World War I and World War II. Several Jane Austen novels, as well as a book about Austen’s work, were among those. Question: How did the soldiers, sailors, and air personnel get their copies? In the first war, large…

  • Austen’s Words Soothe Soldiers, Home Folks

    Austen’s Words Soothe Soldiers, Home Folks

    Nearly eighty years after the end of World War II, it is fitting to remember that Britain’s bulldog leader once benefitted from the soothing words of Jane Austen during the world’s largest military conflagration. Winston Churchill lay abed with the flu during the middle of the war. His doctors told him: “Don’t work, don’t worry.”…

  • Good Reads for Austen Lovers

    Good Reads for Austen Lovers

    This being my first blog for Always Austen, I thought I would provide a little of my background. I am your basic unemployable English major who ended up in high tech, returning to literature—and Jane Austen—after many years in the corporate world. I have two distinct areas of interest. The first is Jane Austen’s development…