Unexpectedly Austen
This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and readers and fans around the world are celebrating her life, works, and legacy. As part of the celebrations, Liz Philosophos Cooper and I are co-editing a series of tributes to and reflections on Austen by well-known members of the public. Each month, we’ll share a new installment of the series, “Unexpectedly Austen,” on the Jane Austen Society of North America website.
In the January installment, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen writes that “Jane Austen is, and will always be, the improbable inimitable immortal,” and NBA star Dwyane Wade reflects on the enduring appeal of Pride and Prejudice and on “how a love story from Regency England could be relevant to a 21st century basketball player from the Southside of Chicago.”
Read the tributes in full on the JASNA website.
I’m excited about the series, and I hope you’ll follow along! I wish I could tell you all the names of the people who responded to our invitation to write tributes and reflections, but I’d better keep that a secret for now. I’ll share links to the monthly installments here on my blog.
As I’ve mentioned here in the past, to celebrate the 250th JASNA is offering free one-year Student Memberships.
I hope the new year is off to a good start for all of you, and I’m wishing you peace and happiness in the months ahead. I’ll end today’s post with some photos from a recent hike with my husband at Herring Cove Provincial Park.
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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
“I bought maps in every town” (Nashville photos and Ann Patchett’s first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars)
“The bells rang back through the woods” (Christmas in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon)
Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
