JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
A Janeite is a Jane Austen fan. Quite possibly a Jane Austen fanatic. Austen, who was born on December 16, 1775 and died two hundred years ago on July 18, 1817 was the author of six beloved novels. She has such a devoted following these days that she is more than a novelist: She is…
Jane Austen, the well-loved British novelist who died 200 years ago today, mentioned Jews in only one of her novels. (That would be “Northanger Abbey,” in which the heroine shuts down a suitor’s casual anti-Semitism in a sequence of giggle-inducing awkwardness; points for Austen.) But the author has inspired Jews since her work first went…
Gaza. It’s the four-letter word of the Middle East. Nobody wants to say it. Nobody wants to think about it. Yet the contentious strip of land controlled by Hamas issued last week described living conditions as “more and more wretched” and predicted that the coastal enclave would become unlivable as soon as 2020. Electricity is…
Jane Austen wrote her legendary novels on a small, twelve-sided walnut table situated by a window near the rarely used front door of her family’s cottage in the English village of Chawton. She used a quill pen with ink she may have made herself, on small sheets of writing paper that could easily be shielded…
Some members of “alt-right” movement are hoisting up Jane Austen as an icon — hoping to equate their vision of white nationalism with a beloved literary icon. “By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen — a much-beloved author with a centuries-long…
Getty Images Nora Ephron may no longer be with us (sob!) but her work lives on. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Portlandia’s” Carrie Brownstein is set to complete and unfinished script by the late Ephron for an adapted British mini-series, “Lost in Austen.” Sam Mendes, of “American Beauty” and “Skyfall” fame, is apparently attached as…
Not this again. After the success of “Bridesmaids” seemed to finally sound the death knell for the whole “women can’t be as funny as men” canard, we’re right back to hearing “women can’t write like men.” The culprit this time? Acclaimed novelist V.S. Naipaul, who dissed all women writers, and said none were his match….
As I prepared for the beginning of the perennial Purim question of “Esther vs. Vashti” at the same time as I delved into Jane Eyre-mania, I began to think about how women are always pushed into dichotomies. I wondered cynically how soon someone would write about the new Brontë films by declaring Jane Austen passé….
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