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If Jane Austen’s novels run on closed social worlds, courtship rituals, status anxiety, gossip and relentless scrutiny of who’s coupling with who, it follows that the obvious contemporary equivalent would be reality... Read more »
The word “hotel” is cognate with “hostel” and “hospital”, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits... Read more »
My earliest reading memorySwallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened.... Read more »
Boarding a flight in 1983, Jane Birkin found herself wrestling with the open straw basket into which she habitually crammed everything from playscripts to nappies. As she reached for the overhead locker... Read more »
After Elizabeth Bennet walked 3 miles across fields to visit her sick sister, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice came in for scandalised criticism of her “blowsy” hair and petticoats “six inches... Read more »
Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, was such an exuberant, inventive writer. It’s the sheer energy of the voice you notice first, picking up one of her books from the shelf;... Read more »
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Former journalist Gill Hornby, 65, published her first novel in her early 50s but it wasn’t until writing her third, Miss Austen (2020), that she hit her stride. Centred on Jane Austen’s... Read more »