Why is Jane Austen endlessly adaptable? After all, her Pride and Prejudice character, Elizabeth Bennett, has fought zombies, investigated murders, been a video blogger and has performed Bollywood dance numbers. Is it the brilliant plotting, the wonderful characters or the humour that makes her work so readily transplanted to the screen, stage and page in so many different variations?American author, Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) has published her own Austen-inspired novel, The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) and helps Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange answer these questions in the last of our series celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen.Listen to the other Dear Jane episodes here.
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Jeanette Winterson releases the reading Genie
For Jeanette Winterson, reading has been her liberation but she's worried about its future. She asks what AI means for storytelling in her new book One Aladdin Two Lamps. American author Lily King shares the surprising origin of her tear-jerker love-triangle novel, Heart the Lover and we consider the parallels between Regency England and Pakistan in our next instalment of Dear Jane.For British author Jeanette Winterson, the life of the imagination has been the motivating force throughout her life. More recently, the intersection of literature, humanity and technology in the form of AI has preoccupied the author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? She's gathered her ideas about this intersection and what it means for storytelling in a new book, One Aladdin Two Lamps, which also tackles the famous text 1001 Nights. In the face of this technological innovation, she asks the troubling question: will we be reading books in the future?Heart the Lover is the sixth novel by American author Lily King. It follows Jordan, a young woman at college who is torn between two men who also happen to be best friends. The choices she makes will ripple throughout her life. The book is both a tear-jerker and a love triangle and draws the reader to the emotional end.We don our bonnets to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen in the fourth episode in our series, Dear Jane. So far, we've delved into Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion and today we focus on the flawed character of Emma Woodhouse, who graces Austen's fourth published novel, Emma. Laleen Sukhera is our guide and founded the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan over a decade ago (and has hosted many Austen style tea parties). She finds parallels between life in Emma's Regency England and the Pakistan of her 1990s youth.
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04 | Dear Jane — Reading Emma in Pakistan
Jane Austen's influence has spread well beyond the Anglosphere 250 years after her birth and today we consider the the parallels between Austen's Regency England and contemporary Pakistan. Laleen Sukhera is the founder of the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (which has expanded to the Jane Austen Society MENAP - Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan) and grew up reading Jane Austen. Now based in Dubai, she shares the many similarities between tea time, the marriage market and expectations on women in Austen's time and the Pakistan of her youth. She also shares why she has a soft spot for the fabulously flawed Emma Woodhouse in Austen's fourth published novel, Emma. Listen to the other episodes in Dear Jane here.
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Megha Majumdar and Sally Hepworth on climate crisis and granny serial killers
Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief asks what a billionaire, a manager and homeless person have in common, Sally Hepworth reveals the dramatic confession that led to her latest novel Mad Mabel and in the third episode of Dear Jane we are swept off our feet by the romance in Austen's Persuasion.Indian novelist Megha Majumdar's high stakes second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, drills into the moral dilemma posed by climate catastrophe and the will to survive. It takes a near future Kolkata ravaged by drought and famine and pits middle-class Ma against impoverished Boomba. Both are trying to survive and support their families but who has the moral high ground in this scenario? Megha reflects on how becoming a parent made her the writer she needed to be and why she doesn't want to reinforce the "noble mother" stereotype in her fiction.Australian author Sally Hepworth's tenth book can be thought of as a heartwarming crime novel. While this description might sound like a contradiction, Mad Mabel is about a granny serial killer but is also about loneliness, neglect and female friendship. Sally tells Claire about the unexpected confession that was inspiration for the book.We continue our celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen with the third episode in our series, Dear Jane. So far, we've busted some myths and revealed why Austen loves sailors. Today we focus on the romance in Jane Austen's Persuasion with Australian comedian and lover of romance, Alice Fraser. Alice is the author of A Passion for Passion: A Delirious Love Letter to Romance.
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03 | Dear Jane — Persuasion, the original second chance romance
Jane Austen's novel Persuasion was the last she completed before her death and it is considered a more mature, sombre romance, and in Dear Jane, we ask what makes it so special?Persuasion follows the ever dependable Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth's rekindled romance after an eight year hiatus when it was deemed unsuitable. Australian comedian Alice Fraser describes it as the original second-chance romance and explains why it's different from Austen's other romances. Alice is the author of A Passion for Passion: A Delirious Love Letter to Romance.
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