Category: war
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Two Women, A World Apart
Two books give me joy in the New Year. The first, by Sarah Emsley, is The Austens, a novel about Jane Austen’s relationship with her sister-in-law, Fanny Palmer Austen. The second, by Rebecca Romney, is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, nonfiction about women writers who shaped the English author. Both works are part of the onslaught of…
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Thaddeus Ever Valiant
There’s always the hope that there might remain a brilliant female writer from the 1700s or early 1800s who has been lost to obscurity. That’s why, over the years, I go back once in a while to read someone new to me. One of these is Jane Porter, who along with her sister Maria became…
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A Taxing Subject for Americans—and for Austen, Her Peers
April is tax month in the U.S. for most people, so this month’s blog will cover the topic. For the British of Jane Austen’s time, as well as for modern citizens, taxes were both necessary for the realm and a drain on the populace. (My fellow Always Austen author, Don Jacobson, took on the topic…
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Tough World for Jane Austen
In reflecting back on my first work of fiction on the life of Jane Austen, I knew I had my Jane Austen novel when I read a seemingly unrelated work: Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder. This history of scientific and industrial developments during the period spanning Austen’s life went far beyond “three or four…
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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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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…
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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 Waterloo Dispatch (or) a Battle by Any Other Name
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo (which was located at that time in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, but is now located in Belgium), marking the end of what is commonly known as the Napoleonic Wars. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two armies of what was known as…
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Taxes More Inevitable Than Death in Austen’s Britain
The blog schedule lobbed a fat one across the center of the plate this month! Tax Day in the United States is April 15th. Since that date is ingrained in the American national consciousness, this becomes the only realistic topic for a post dropping on the 12th. ’Tis true that Mr. Franklin sardonically noted, “…but…