JASNA (Jane
Austen Society of North America) member, VOYA reviewer, and school media specialist Christina Miller is York College (CUNY) Library's "High School Librarian," the library's liaison to the on-campus Queens High School for the Sciences at York College.
The
Austen note will be issued as a Au10 note, within a year of the Churchill Au5 note, which is targeted for issue during 2016.
and a portrait of
Austen commissioned by her nephew James Edward
Austen Leigh, adapted from a sketch by her sister.
She sets out to demonstrate, with impeccably researched evidence and much reference to the novels, that the idea of Jane
Austen that most people have is seriously mistaken.
Here, the critic avers, earnestness always denotes "moral seriousness" as a devotional counter by the Anglican Church to Evangelical challenges in the 1790s (190), with which
Austen would have been much in sympathy.
Along with Shakespeare and Dickens, Jane
Austen unites excellence with popularity; she is, in Brownstein's pithy appraisal, both great and delightful.
I] am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour,"
Austen wrote in the letter.
Probably written in 1804, this heavily corrected draft represents the earliest surviving manuscript for a novel by Jane
Austen.
What you learn from the book--or are reminded of, depending on your level of familiarity with
Austen scholarship--is that
Austen cared very much about her fame; that her family worried about the incompatibility of authorship and female virtue (a woman's reputation being inextricably linked to her sexual purity, as Lydia Bennet's case makes clear); and that once she attained a foothold in the public imagination, she ascended to the ranks of superstardom in two significant leaps, one at the end of the nineteenth century and the other one hundred years later.
Sutherland said the revelations shouldn't damage the reputation of
Austen, who was little known when she died in 1817 at the age of 41 but has since become one of Britain's most beloved authors.
In the two centuries since Henry
Austen made that assessment, curiosity about his sister's life, along with enthusiasm for her work, have reached a frenzied level, and her very name has become "an infinitely exploited global brand," as Claire Harman observes in her fascinating and beautifully written study of the shifts and changes in the novelist's reputation, Jane's Fame.
Of course, Jane
Austen and Charles Darwin were similarly fascinated by the natural history of human beings.
