“The year to appreciate Austen”
My daughter gave me a beautiful copy of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan recently, and I was glad to see this hilarious novella included in John Mullan’s guide to Austen’s writing: he says that “Lady Susan’s wittily cynical letters to her confidante Mrs Johnson (Alicia) are a devilish hoot” (“Where to start with: Jane Austen,” published in The Guardian last month).
I also liked Mullan’s description of Fanny Price as a “true heroine,” who “must stay true to herself, while observing the idiocies of the entitled Bertrams, who have adopted her, and circumventing the schemes of the charming but diabolical Mary Crawford.”
As the subtitle for the piece in The Guardian says, “This is the year to appreciate Austen.” John Mullan will be a plenary speaker at the Jane Austen Society of North America AGM in Baltimore, MD, in October. The theme is “Austen at 250: No check to my Genius from beginning to end.” If you haven’t seen it already, you can find the AGM Preview Brochure on the JASNA website.
I’ll end with a photo I took in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, last Saturday. I’m longing for blue skies, but there’s beauty in those shades of white and grey, too.
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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
“Sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship” (The bend in the road at Point Pleasant Park, Green Gables fabric, “Lucy. Maud.,” and the Anne of Green Gables manuscript)
“Following the path” (photos from a hike at Graves Island)
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.
