Category: Royalty
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When Was a Birthday, Not Really the Day One Was Born? Or Another Meaning for “Double Dating”
Recently, I was attempting to explain this concept to my grandchildren, who were anticipating no school for President’s Day. However, they did you know that George Washington was actually born on February 11, 1731, and NOT on February 22, 1732, as we in the United States celebrate. How is that possible? First, let us look…
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Miss Austen—No Politician, She
On the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, she remains a touchstone for politics for many people. We find that white supremacists are co-opting the English author in support of a racial dictatorship, shocked opponents are claiming that true readers are “rational, compassionate, liberal-minded people,” and conservatives are chiding Janeites for assuming that great literature…
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Fresh Thoughts on the 2024 AGM
It is ever so difficult to characterize an annual general meeting (AGM) of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). There are so many different elements—local tours, specialty events, sometimes a major evening event, the plenary speeches open to all attendees. Multiple breakout sessions go simultaneously for two days so that no one person…
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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…
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The Woman Behind the Man
Hi everyone. I was reading information the other day about Napoleon, and then got to reading about his first wife. So, I decided to share a look behind the man at the woman who helped to make him who he was. Josephine Bonaparte was born Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie. I thought I…
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Hug Him and Squeeze Him and Call Him George
Above image: King George IV’s landing at Leith Scotland, by William Lizar, August 1822 Next Tuesday marks the 201st anniversary of King George IV’s, known to Regency readers as Prinny, visit to Edinburgh, Scotland – the first official visit of Great Britain’s monarch since the exiled King Charles II’s Scottish coronation in January 1651 amidst…
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The Enlightenment, Austen, and the Regent
Historians are nothing if not epochal creatures. We divide time into epochs and apply catchy names—The Golden Age, The Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and so on. Some span centuries, some only decades. Their kinship rests in that each marks moments—long or short—when everything changed. Such is the case of that ninety-year revolution we call The…
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In Defence of King Jimmy
King James VI of Scotland, I of England (1566-1625), is a prominent figure in the history of Great Britain, and the Scottish king’s ascension to the English throne plays a key role in Mistaken Premise. King James was the only child of Mary, Queen of Scots, with her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a…