Happy Birthday, Jane!

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, Stephanie Insley Hershinow offers a survey of recent Austen-related books and artworks.

By Stephanie Insley HershinowDecember 16, 2025

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY of North America first met in 1979 at the Gramercy Park Hotel, just steps from my CUNY office. No plaque marks this momentous occasion, but JASNA lives on, now boasting more than 5,000 members and over 80 regional societies. That first meeting was covered in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. One guest discussed the term “Janeites,” which she felt “doesn’t sound exactly right […] I’m not sure Jane would have liked it.” I’m less sure that Austen wouldn’t have liked it. After all, contra the family hagiography that cropped up shortly after her early death, Austen was at least tickled by the prospect of fame, and she thrilled at the small profit she gained from her writing. The idea that, as her brother wrote, Austen “turned away from any allusion to the character of the authoress” is just one of the myths that contemporary scholarship is quick to debunk.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, and the year has met with a flurry of gifts for veteran and aspiring Janeites alike—academic and popular studies, biographies, adaptations, and exhibitions. Though the anniversary offers a convenient hook for publication, the wave of work on Austen shows no sign of slowing down. At a time when reading for pleasure has declined, one thing is certain: Jane Austen fans read. A recent JASNA signing event featured over two dozen authors, many of them flogging titles published by university presses, all met with lines of patient readers flocking to their Regency comic con. It would seem Austen offers endless opportunity for examination and reexamination; still, it might be fair to ask what more one can say about our dear Jane. The titles under review here answer this question variously, but it’s clear to me that the best examples bridge or outright defy the traditional divide between Austen scholarship and Austen fandom.

To celebrate Austen’s birthday is necessarily to call attention to her life story, to the real human person born on December 16, 1775, rather than to the legend who continually threatens to dwarf her. The desire for Austen biography is insatiable, but it must ultimately remain unsatisfied. As with Shakespeare, we know far less about her than we would want. One way to supplement the deficit of information without resorting to sheer invention is to change mediums. One of two graphic biographies of Austen published this year, Janine Barchas’s The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography (with Isabel Greenberg’s illustrations) faces the same challenge posed to any graphic biographer: how to include the necessary exposition deftly in visual form. To achieve this, Barchas and Greenberg load the page with institutional detail—we see the print shop and circulating library where Austen the writer acts instead as a reader. Even the limited color palette provides clever narratorial guidance, as red appears only in the frames where Austen’s fictional world intrudes upon the otherwise faithful depiction of her biography. Elsewhere, characters assume something akin to the role of narrator, providing context we might expect from a more omniscient voice. The effect is charming, as if figures from Austen’s life are filling the reader in sotto voce. The time frame of the biography is limited, as the authors choose to give depth rather than breadth, focusing exclusively on Austen’s writing life. Barchas’s extensive scholarship is on display not only in the detail of the episodes covered but also in the copious endnotes documenting her sources. Greenberg—whose Glass Town (2020) mashed up the childhood and juvenilia of the Brontë siblings—is no stranger to literary subjects, and her sketchy style is well suited to Austen’s wit. That said, I found myself wishing a bit more of the whimsy and experimentation of Glass Town had made its way into this treatment of a literary life.

Whimsy is on full display in Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, Devoney Looser’s follow-up to The Making of Jane Austen (2017). Looser is perhaps most well known for her roller derby persona (Stone Cold Jane Austen); nevertheless, as an Austen scholar, her authority in the field comes from her ability to pull off the impossible: to reveal new—actually new—discoveries from the archive. Among her recent findings is the fact that Austen’s brother was a very active participant in the antislavery discussions of his day; this context lends texture to Austen’s own minimal references to supporting abolitionism in her personal writings. In Wild for Austen, Looser highlights some fun finds: the first known example of Austen erotica, for example, written by someone with the legal name … wait for it … Roger Longrigg. On top of these gems from the archive, I encountered deeper connections that were previously unknown to me. The fact that Austen’s great-uncle was widely known as a bookseller who worked alongside heavyweights such as Samuel Richardson was news to me, and its inclusion enriched my sense of her family’s aspirations to solidify their connections to London print culture.

Such bookselling trivia catalyzes Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, which uses Austen as a springboard to launch an investigation (complete with running Sherlock Holmes motif) into what scholar Clifford Siskin has called “The Great Forgetting”: the literary historical substitution of Austen for all of the female novelists who proceeded and inspired her. Unlike Barchas and Looser, Romney is not an academic; she comes to Austen studies from the rare book world and is perhaps most well known for acting as the resident rare books expert for History Channel’s Pawn Stars (2009– ). For most scholars of the British novel, Romney’s discoveries will come as no surprise. Decades after the feminist recovery efforts of the 1980s, authors like Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth have mercifully found their way into the canon. But those of us who already know of their joys shouldn’t scoff at Romney’s attempt to introduce these authors to a much broader audience. Anyone who has lamented yet another production of Pride and Prejudice (1813) before any notice of Burney’s Evelina (1778) should welcome this celebration of the authors Austen herself loved. To my mind, Romney’s book is one of the most refreshing and exciting of the (many) titles timed to appear during this anniversary year. Why? Because it directs readers back to the novels themselves, filling their TBRs with more Old Stuff.

In A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 (which ran from June 6 through September 14, 2025), the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City invited visitors to celebrate the semiquincentennial of Austen’s birth with an exhibition divided between a more or less chronological exploration of her life and a survey of her enduring fame. The show was curated by Dale Stinchcomb, the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan, and Juliette Wells, a professor of literary studies at Goucher College and keeper of the Baltimore branch of the Alberta Burke collection. The visitor entered a recreation of Austen’s home, complete with a replica of her iconic octagonal writing table and the vibrant wallpaper of the dining room in which, it is thought, she did much of her writing. (The wallpaper was recreated from a fragment discovered in 2018 and reproduced by master artisans at Hamilton Weston.)

While Austen published her novels anonymously (the norm in this period), she did not conceal her identity from family and friends. One of my favorite items on display was Opinions of Emma, on loan from the British library. There, we see Austen subjecting herself to the equivalent of Regency Goodreads, soliciting reactions to her novel from family members and friends, who didn’t appear to hold back. One entry for “Fanny K.” (Austen’s eldest niece, Fanny Knight) reads: “not so well as either P. & P. or M P.—could not bear Emma herself.—Mr. Knightley delightful.—Should like J. F. [Jane Fairfax]—if she knew more of her.” Another reads, “My Mother—thought it more entertaining than M P.—but not so interesting as P. & P.—No characters in it equal to L[ad]y Catherine & Mr. Collins.” Seeing her collection of reviews alongside the scant extant manuscripts and several remaining letters, the visitor gains unparalleled access to Austen’s writing life. Key to the exhibition’s success is its trust in the visitor. It invites us to participate in niche controversies that have troubled Austen scholars for generations. Is this William Blake print the one Austen referred to in that letter? Is the handwriting on this scrap Jane’s or her sister Cassandra’s? The deft curation not only draws us into Austen’s life; it also makes Austen scholarship feel like a living and lively endeavor.

The exhibition marks a double anniversary: Austen’s 250th as well as the 50th anniversary of the gift of manuscripts to the Morgan by Alberta Burke, a Baltimore philanthropist. Burke was an inveterate Austen collector, writing away to London auction houses with bids on the scattered letters that would make their way into catalogs and keeping careful track of Austen mentions in popular culture. Her notebooks of memorabilia are filled with newspaper clippings, magazine layouts, all the most minor midcentury Austen trivia. Burke fussily corrects radio programs when they get some detail of Austeniana wrong (“Not Fitzgerald, Fitzwilliam”). Burke had been active in UK conversations that would lead to the 1940 establishment of the Jane Austen Society, which aimed to preserve Chawton Cottage, where Austen lived the last, most productive years of her life. According to legend, Burke was present as the British fans lamented the scattering of Austen memorabilia: “Even a lock of her hair belongs to some American.” Burke stood: “I am that American. And you may have the lock of hair.” The moment was covered in the press, and Burke dutifully pasted each mention into her scrapbooks, now housed at the Goucher College Library. Of the 160-odd extant Austen letters, the Morgan owns an impressive 51. Several standouts were on display here. While the Morgan boasts the largest collection of Austen manuscripts in the world, the show included items from a dozen other collections, including very important pieces from Chawton Cottage, which is styled “Jane Austen’s House” and is home to the parlor recreated here on Madison Avenue.

Even for visitors who may have missed the significance of the corner of the exhibition dedicated to Burke, the show was unmistakably a celebration of Austen’s reception in the United States. It featured not one but four (of a known six) copies of the unauthorized American edition of Emma, published during Austen’s lifetime but without her knowledge. At the exit was a staggering portrait by Amy Sherald, by far the largest piece in the exhibition. One might momentarily feel transported to the Sherald show at the Whitney downtown. But no, the painting (loaned from a private owner) was included for its title, an echo of the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: “A single man in possession of a good fortune.” In it, a young and handsome Black man meets the viewer’s gaze, wearing a sweater featuring a grid of buildings (perhaps viewed through a window) before a flat monochromatic background, a characteristic feature of Sherald’s work. The title is suggestive, performing something of the cross-temporal jumping of Kehinde Wiley’s recreations of historical paintings. Is this young man a character from an Austen novel? Ending with the painting, alongside a display of translations of Pride and Prejudice, communicates one of the show’s primary claims: that Austen is for everybody.

As I was leaving the exhibition, another guest leaned over conspiratorially and said, “It’s her sentences, the quality of her sentences. That’s what brings us back.” (Clearly, I look like the type to appreciate such a comment, and boy did I.) I hope other visitors left with the same impression, inspired to revisit the novels. It’s impossible to honor the experience of solitary reading—the magic of revisiting Austen again and again—by arranging objects in a gallery, but this particular exhibit came close. I couldn’t help but think that its title, A Lively Mind, also evoked Austen’s signature technical achievement, her sophisticated deployment of free indirect discourse, a narrative tool unevenly present in the work of earlier English writers but masterfully deployed throughout her novels. Free indirect discourse melds the voices of narrator and characters until it seems as if the reader is able to dip into a character’s consciousness. We hear their thoughts with a rare intimacy. Faced with manuscript pages never intended for public view, we feel as if we’re able to access something of Austen’s mind, and at once to hope that this access feels more like intimacy than intrusion.

Writing about Virginia Woolf in 1973, Elizabeth Hardwick quipped, “Bloomsbury is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season.” We might be tempted to say the same of Austenland: what’s left for us to scoop? But as these volumes attest—for the Austen fan, Austen scholar, and those of us somewhere in between—there are still plenty of fish in the pond.