Jane Austen July 2026 discussion

What are you reading this Jane Austen July?

I'm thinking of re-reading The Jane Austen Society, and Bloomsbury Girls, so I can read Natalie Jenner's other books for the first time; Every Time We Say Goodbye, and Austen At Sea! <3

A lot. I picked up illustrated editions of Love and Freindship, Jack & Alice and Frederic and Elfrida from the collections of the late Marcia Folsom of JASNA Massachusetts.

Reading Jane Austen's Bookshelf and listening to a talk by JASNA president Mary Mintz increased my TBR of Austen contempories and 18th and 19th century women writers.

My household has a trial of BritBox through Amazon so of course I will be watching The Other Bennet sister.

And there's a bunch of new books published last year for Jane's 250th birthday I have yet to read!

I plan to start with reading Introducing Mrs. Collins by Rachel Parris, and my audiobook for the next few weeks will be Juliet Stevenson narrating Mansfield Park.

I am so excited for this year’s Jane Austen July. I even made a whole display for it in the bookstore I help out in last year and it was so popular it stayed up all year round! I haven’t read MP in a LONG time so I was going to read that this year anyway and then it was the Readalong pick so that’s perfect! Here are my other reads:

Jane Austen July 2026

The Challenges

1. Read one of Jane Austen’s main six novels
- Mansfield Park
2. Read something by Jane Austen that is not one of her main six novels
- The Watsons (finished by Claudia Gray) I got an ARC of this- but it is coming out Nov 17!
3. Read a non-fiction work about Jane Austen or her time
- What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
- Jane Austen Pocket Portrait
4. Read a retelling of a Jane Austen book OR a work of historical fiction set in Jane Austen’s time
- The Murder of Mr Wickham
- Pride Before a Fall?
- Austenland?
5. Read a book by a contemporary of Jane Austen (i.e., published between 1775–1817)
- The Mysteries of Udolpho

Started Mansfield Park

I am enjoying The Female Quixote. I can easily see the influence on young Jane. Arabella is young, sheltered, naive and silly like Jane's juvenile heroines. I can see Arabella as a prototype for Catherine Morland. Catherine is not quite so silly.

I flipped through the first part of Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen. It's fiction but different. It tells Jane's life story through the scraps of fabric used in the quilt the Austen women made. There's a lot of new/different information in the first part. Not many biographies go into detail about her time living in the village after she was weaned and Christened. The pictures are better from the necks down. Their oversized heads look weird. The background details are taken from the Jane Austen House Museum and other known Austenania.

LOL Arabella! She's like Emma, imagining things about the men she encounters.

Patchwork is interesting but I don't get the interlude about where the fabrics come from. Does anyone today write a biography of someone famous and talk about what's on their phone/social media and where the components for that phone came from? Or who made the clothes they wear and where the cloth came from? No. We don't think about it any more than they did in the Georgian era.

Some of the illustrations are a little... intense. Lots of distress, disease and death.

I finished my re-telling challenge book: Introducing Mrs. Collins by Rachel Parris. It's [Pride & Prejudice] fan fiction focusing on Charlotte Lucas and her marriage to Mr. Collins. I'm not a huge fan of Austen re-tellings/fan fiction; I generally give them a try and then ultimately abandon these books that others gush over.

In this case I think Rachel Parris portrayed Charlotte as I imagined her, so I was pleasantly surprised. Her writing style is good, although there were some passages that had 21st century sensibilities which would have been out of place in Austen's time. Still, most of the dialogue was of the era and there were some good quips. I think the story was relatively realistic and mostly followed what we are told in the original. Parris is a member of Austentacious, a UK comedy improv group that does skits based on Austen's works, so she's been working with Austen's writing for some years now.

I read Snapdragons Set in the 1780s and am reading A Lark's Gambit set in 1816.

Next up I will be rereading Cecily, by Clare Darcy, my favorite Georgette Heyer wannabe author.

@QNPoohBear: I read that one this weekend as well! I found it delightful.

I am enjoying The Female Quixote, which technically was published before Jane's lifetime but it was one she read and which influenced her writing. I see Catherine Morland, Emma Woodhouse and Marianne Dashwood. Marianne and Arabella would get along like a house on fire. Fortunately Marianne has Elinor to provide the sense. Arabella reads too many romances and she takes them for "real, true solemn history" and yammers on to all and sundry about certain historical "truths" as if she lived them and no one has a clue what she's talking about. I found the reference to the Olympics especially interesting as the first modern Olympic games wasn't held until 1892, more than a century after Arabella was going on and on about it!

She does seem to be an inadvertent feminist. She was horrified when a gentleman labeled Cleopatra a "whore." and there are other incidents where she champions women both past and present. But good grief this is going on too long. I'm waiting for someone learned to come along and educate her on the difference between history and historical fiction.

I'm also wondering whether Lucy Maud Montgomery ever read this book because Arabella's favorite stories remind me an awful lot of Anne Shirley's imagination. Arabella would be right there with Anne playing The Lady of Shalott!

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen is interesting but I don't care for the illustrations. The faces are rather grotesque caricatures at times. I also didn't really see the need for the author's interjections in the footnotes or the section on where cloth comes from. I don't think George's voice was silenced. It's not as if the family locked him up and threw away the key. He was on a farm, I believe, and with Mrs. Austen's brother who had the same or similar difference with people who had the time and ability to look after them. Jane wrote about talking with her hands and perhaps she wrote about him in the letters that don't survive or they spoke of him.

Three episodes into The Other Bennet Sister and I'm enjoying it for the most part. It's an adaptation of a long book and cuts out the middle section. I only liked part 3 of the book so I'm OK with the cuts.

Anne of Avenue A doesn't work as a modern retelling of Persuasion. I didn't like Freddie and I didn't understand why Anne was stuck doing everything for everyone, including her father when women have more options now! I only liked Freddie writing handwritten notes and seeing their past. The modern story simply isn't funny and the satire seems to be directed at the film and TV industry, namely reality TV and possibly also business. I don't know anything about either of those worlds to understand if those parts were supposed to be funny or satire? Persuasion doesn't update very well.

I will post a full review tomorrow.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about The Other Bennet Sister. Is it only available on Britt Box? I didn't finish that book because I didn't like how she wrote Charlotte Lucas. So if they cut a good bit of that out, I might actually enjoy the show. Hopefully the costumes are better than the ones from Seeking Persephone. Those costumes were terrible. None of the jackets or breeches fit the men properly. And the women's costumes couldn't decide if they were going for accurate or Bridgerton. The fabrics looked cheap. I could do a thread count on some of them. But the colors were nice, and some of the designs had potential.

The Other Bennet Sister is on BritBox. Amazon Prime was offering a promotion 99 cents a month for two months so we subscribed. So far Charlotte is only in the first and second episodes. Mary is enjoying herself in London.

Mary's Longbourn dresses look good. I love her gold muslin Meryton Assembly dress however bib front gowns are for daytime but I can't complain because my own ball gown is also gold muslin in a wrap front style. Mary is experimenting with her style in London so her gowns are eclectic. The other actresses don't have enough bosom to look good in this era. Frock Flicks bloggers apparently having a laughing fit. I think the costumes are ok but not 100% accurate. Better than Bridgerton and Sanditon. Mary needs to wear gloves though. No one is wearing gloves.

To the complainers about Seeking Persephone... it was crowd sourced so you get what you pay for. Save your money and contribute to the next one. I chose not to donate so I can not complain if I do not care for the production values.

Seeking Persephone was something I stumbled on while looking for a new show to watch. I had no idea it was crowd sourced. That explains a lot. I did find if enjoyable to watch given I've watched it 4 times now

I have yet to watch Seeking Persephone but I plan to do so soon. I didn't love the book enough to want to pay to produce a film but it was nice so many people were so passionate about seeing the book come to life. She's working on another -non Regency- film right now but I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon Studios offers a deal to adapt the next book or another one. I prefer the Jonquils to the Lancasters but anything else is preferable to that monstrosity Netflix called Persuasion. I'm "half agony half hope" over their upcoming Pride and Prejudice!

Really enjoying this video on Mansfield Park by Dr. Octavia Butler:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jPpmau8A-...

Ok, link doesn't seem to be working: it is her close reading of the scene in Mansfield Park where Edmund does the unforgivable thing of letting Mary Crawford ride Fanny's horse. It looks at Fanny's imagination, as well as the technical skills of Jane Austen.

Started Part 4 of The Other Bennet Sister. I don't remember Miss Baxter from the book but I'm glad Mary has a friend. Caroline Bingley has arrived in London and encountered Mary.

If anyone likes Mary's Assembly/ball gown, I found the fabric online at Renaissance Fabrics and also on Etsy. Look for white cotton voile with gold stripe.

And I purchased the pattern from Hungarican Chick
https://hungarican.blogspot.com/2010/...

Listening to an audiobook of Lover's Vows.

The Other Bennet Sister Episode 5
As Mary makes new friends (and conquests), Caroline Bingley seeks to bring Mary down and remind her of her place. The episode ends with a dramatic cliffhanger!

The Other Bennet sister has departed wildly from the novel and even farther from the source material. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is someone else's aunt now, apparently. I like Mary and I'm enjoying it as a standalone Regency story. If you don't think of it as a Pride and Prejudice sequel or even the novel The Other Bennet Sister, it's better.

I grabbed Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane at the library.

I continually find myself annoyed with and mystified by Arabella in The Female Quixote. I have no idea what she's talking about, the other characters have no idea what she's talking about. Except now someone does and he's using it to his advantage. I need an annotated edition of this novel to keep up with Arabella.

QNPoohBear wrote: "I continually find myself annoyed with and mystified by Arabella in The Female Quixote. I have no idea what she's talking about, the other characters have no idea what she's talking about. Except now someone does and he's using it to his advantage. I need an annotated edition of this novel to keep up with Arabella.."

I would have been lost without the Oxford Classics edition. Most of the more obscure characters and situations that Arabella is referring to were explained. Many are from the 17th c. novels of Madeleine de Scudery, which were inspired by stories from the ancient Greeks and Romans.

I also listened to it on audio (Juliet Stevenson) and she made it very clear what was narrative and what was dialogue, which is sometimes difficult in the print editions I've seen. So between the audio and the Oxford notes, I felt I got more of the humor and intent.

I just started A Simple Story, a novel by Elizabeth Inchbald, the author of "Lovers' Vows." This novel was Inchbald's first published work; she had been an actress, but became a writer later in life. It looks like there might be some complicated plot lines ahead, but the dialogue is good and it's not difficult to understand at all, unlike The Female Quixote.

Kathy wrote: "I would have been lost without the Oxford Classics edition. Most of the more obscure characters and situations that Arabella is referring to were explained. Many are from the 17th c. novels of Madeleine de Scudery, which were inspired by stories from the ancient Greeks and Romans.

I also listened to it on audio (Juliet Stevenson) and she made it very clear what was narrative and what was dialogue, which is sometimes difficult in the print editions I've seen. So between the audio and the Oxford notes, I felt I got more of the humor and intent.
."

None of the libraries in the system have the print book. I get the humor from the audio book, thank you for the recommendation, and I know there's a point to it but I have no clue what Arabella is talking about most of the time except I can see a direct line to Sir Walter Scott's and how he influenced Lucy Maud Montgomery who put her love of poetry and "romances" into Anne Shirley.

The Other Bennet Sister ep. 8 departs from the characters Jane set for us. We know in Pride and Prejudice Mr. Gardiner is an avid fisherman. We know he has little opportunity for leisure time but apparently this Mr. Gardiner doesn't know how to fish and seems to have plenty of leisure time for socializing and vacation. It's returned to the basics of the plot of the novel but different.

The costumes are so-so. Mary's day dresses look good but she's not wearing the correct stays or corset for the styles. Some of the costumes are reused from other productions. Miss Baxter looks very pretty but Aunt Gardiner and Caroline Bingley are tall, very thin and not wearing their gowns with the correct corset and don't look good. Mrs. Bennet is a decade or two ahead of fashion and the cotton print in Lizzie's dress looks wrong for that early in the roller printing process. Not sure though because sometimes I find prints with more colors than expected. Mary's cotton ballgown is the right fabric but the bib front style is more for daytime.

https://www.countryandtownhouse.com/s...

https://frockflicks.com/wrapping-up-t...