Friday Links
Master of the Castello Nativity
Happy Birthday, Jane!
Caught in the Act of Greatness: Jane Austen at 250
Anthony Domestico’s Year in Books
‘She Radiated Christ’: Brown University’s Catholic Chaplain Remembers Ella Cook
Megan McArdle on The Brother I Lost
James Matthew Wilson on How the Creed Changed the World | 1700 years of the Nicene Creed
Happy Birthday, Jane!
This week marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, and the year has met with a flurry of gifts for veteran and aspiring Janeites alike—academic and popular studies, biographies, adaptations, and exhibitions. Though the anniversary offers a convenient hook for publication, the wave of work on Austen shows no sign of slowing down. At a time when reading for pleasure has declined, one thing is certain: Jane Austen fans read. A recent JASNA signing event featured over two dozen authors, many of them flogging titles published by university presses, all met with lines of patient readers flocking to their Regency comic con. It would seem Austen offers endless opportunity for examination and reexamination; still, it might be fair to ask what more one can say about our dear Jane. The titles under review here answer this question variously, but it’s clear to me that the best examples bridge or outright defy the traditional divide between Austen scholarship and Austen fandom.
Caught in the Act of Greatness: Jane Austen at 250
Here’s recording of AEI panel commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Christopher J. Scalia hosted the panel with guests Julia Yost, Amanda Auerbach, and Inger S. B. Brodey. (You should really pick up Julia Yost’s Jane Austen’s Darkness on sale from Wiseblood Books for only $5.00.)
Anthony Domestico’s Year in Books
2025 was largely a year of rereading for me. For various essays, I returned to Muriel Spark, Robert Frost, and Thomas Pynchon. For pleasure, I dipped back into The Stories of John Cheever and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy. For my son, I read, and reread, and rereread, Jon Klassen’s brilliant and macabre I Want My Hat Back. (I gasped when reading that board book’s conclusion for the first time. Subsequent readings haven’t really lessened the shock.)
‘She Radiated Christ’: Brown University’s Catholic Chaplain Remembers Ella Cook
“She loved Jesus Christ. She was a sweet and strong soul. She found friends among the Catholic community, though herself Episcopal, and enjoyed going to Mass and other events at the Catholic Center occasionally.”
Megan McArdle on The Brother I Lost
a week before she died in that nursing home, she had decided to tell me about her regrets, the kinds of regrets that families air on their deathbed. Many of them had to do with me, though none were really hers to regret—she couldn’t have known my third-grade class was bullying me, and it certainly wasn’t her fault that I nearly flunked out of both high school and college. I attempted to reassure her, and when that failed, to divert her, but my mother plowed on, through the failure of her marriage to my father, and the trouble she’d given her own parents.
James Matthew Wilson on How the Creed Changed the World | 1700 years of the Nicene Creed
James Matthew Wilson joins the Into the Truth podcast “to explore how Dante led him to faith, how the Creed answers our search for meaning, how love is the heart of reality, why God became man, how to understand salvation in the light of the Creed, and much more.” This might be the perfect time of year to listen to this podcast.
