To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Times Literary Supplement asked me, “What does Jane Austen mean to you?” On July 19, 2017, I was delighted to be in the company of––among others––Melvyn Bragg, Paula Byrne, Amit Chaudhuri, Deirdre Le Faye, Claire Harman, Claudia L. Johnson, Devoney Looser, Pat Rogers, Patrica Rozema, […]
Jane Austen’s final, unfinished, novel Sanditon depicts hypochondria, property speculation, and consumerism. The University of Otago, Medical Humanities blog Corpus recently featured an essay I wrote investigating the satire Austen employs in this work. Between 27 January and 18 March 1817, Jane Austen wrote her final, unfinished, novel Sanditon, meaning a town built upon sand. […]
In early 2014, an argument about the relationship between Jane Austen and her celebrated contemporary will appear in “Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives,” a collection of essays edited by William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy and published by Bucknell University. I’ll contribute to a symposium in Sydney on the four remarkable novels of 1814, Mansfield Park, Patronage, The Wanderer, and Waverley, talk to the […]
2013 was an exciting year. In June, I spoke about Jane Austen’s satire at a conference on eighteenth-century women writers, held to mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of Chawton House Library. In October, I gave a curtain-raiser” at JASNA in Minneapolis, entitled “Introducing the Real Elizabeth Bennet.” It was delightful to see so […]
Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, 2017. Order Now available in hardback and paperback. Also available from Jane Austen Books, Bucknell University Press, University Book Shop and other usual online book retailers. In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, Jocelyn Harris argues that Jane Austen was a satirist, a celebrity-watcher, and a keen […]
Reading and dramatizing Jane Austen makes her even funnier and more revealing. Jocelyn and Terry MacTavish have presented Jane Austen readings in Dunedin at the Globe Theatre, the Public Art Gallery, and the Savoy restaurant, on such topics as “Women Behaving Badly in Jane Austen,” “Jane Austen and Fashion,” and “Women Chasing Men in Jane […]
Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison. 3 parts. London: Oxford University Press. Repr. 1986 (pbk), 2001. Facsimile reprint available from the University of Otago. The seven-volume Grandison was immensely popular when first published in 1753-54, and highly influential for subsequent generations of writers before it fell into neglect and even derision. This edition […]
Samuel Richardson. Cambridge: CUP. Repr. 2009 and on demand. This book contributed largely to the Richardson “renaissance,” the reappraisal of his novels as the most remarkable and influential of the eighteenth century. As an outsider, Richardson found common cause with women, realising that the relationship between men and women is as politically charged as that […]
Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Repr. 2003 and on demand. Buy Online: Jane Austen Books. Buy Online: Cambridge University Press.
