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The Making of Jane Austen

The Daily Jane Austen

Edition of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period

I'm the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, including The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes (2019) and The Making of Jane Austen (2017), a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book (Nonfiction), which came out in a paperback edition, with an afterword and reader's guide.

​I've also done a series of lectures (on DVD, streaming and Audible) on The Life and Works of Jane Austen, which came out earlier this year, from The Great Courses.

I'm grateful to have been a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, in support of my next book, Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter in the Age of Austen, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2022.​

My recent essays have been published in The Atlantic, New York Times, TLS, Salon, and the Washington Post. 

I have the great good fortune to have a badass roller derby alter ego, Stone Cold Jane Austen. I think Jane Austen would be okay with that, as she, like her strong, athletic heroine Elizabeth Bennet, likely delighted in anything ridiculous, and humans flying around on wheels and hitting each other probably qualifies. (I'm currently training for banked-track play, with the amazing Arizona Derby Dames.)​

​I grew up in Minnesota, where postage-stamp-sized backyards turned into winter ice rinks using garden hoses, and cold weather brought opportunities to snuggle up and read. Now I live in the desert, near a fantastic roller rink, and I have the privilege of teaching women's writings and the history of the novel to college students. I met my husband (also an English professor and Austen scholar) over an argument about Mansfield Park. Together we're raising teen sons who find Austen tolerable but un-tempting.

If you'd like to get in touch, head to the Contact page. I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to see an email from me pop into your inbox once in a while, then please subscribe to my occasional newsletter, for the latest on Austen, women writers, and pop culture, with a little roller derby to keep up to speed. (Past issues are archived here, if you want to check it out first.)