On: object loss, renewed mourning, and psychic change in Jane Austen's Persuasion.

Reading minds: mentalization, irony and literary engagement.

The concept of 'mentalization' has recently provided a fertile resource for thinking about various issues in psychoanalysis, including attachment, children's play, personality disorders and the work of interpretation within the analytic setting. Mentalization also provides fruitful ways of thinking about how we read. This paper will suggest that book reading is akin to mind reading: engaging wi...

The Rewards of Impertinence: Happy and Unhappy Endings in Jane Austen's Novels

Peripheral Phenomena: The Colliding Evolution of Darcy and Dracula

In this study, I examine aspects of Jane Austen, vampire fiction, and contemporary culture through the lens of vampire adaptions of Austen's work. Although a study of vampire fiction may seem peripheral to any serious study of Austen's novels, I contend that studying those adaptations is central to understanding Austen in modern culture, as her work is recycled and reapportioned. Vampire fictio...

Jane Austen's lifelong health problems and final illness: New evidence points to a fatal Hodgkin's disease and excludes the widely accepted Addison's.

Jane Austen is typically described as having excellent health until the age of 40 and the onset of a mysterious and fatal illness, initially identified by Sir Zachary Cope in 1964 as Addison's disease. Her biographers, deceived both by Cassandra Austen's destruction of letters containing medical detail, and the cheerful high spirits of the existing letters, have seriously underestimated the ext...

The Uses and Abuses of Austen’s “absolute Historical Pictures”

IN 1833, in response to the reissue of Austen's fictions in Richard Bentley's series The Standard Novels, the Literary Gazette recommended Austen's fictions to the " rising generation. " Noting that " one " particular " merit. .. of these delightful works is every hour increasing, " the Gazette continues somewhat ruefully that Austen's novels are fast " becoming absolute historical pictures. " ...