Jane's Fame tells the fascinating story of Jane Austen's renown, from the years of rejection the author faced during her lifetime to the global recognition and adoration she now enjoys. Almost two hundred years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, constantly open to revival and reinterpretation and known to millions of people through film and television adaptations as much as through her books. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography—of both the author and her lasting cultural influence—making this essential reading for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

This collection reveals the wide-ranging impact of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on literary and theatrical culture in Georgian Britain. Demonstrating the differing motivations of the state in censoring public performances of plays after the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 and until the Theatres Act 1843, chapters cover a wide variety of theatrical genres across a century and show how the mechanisms of formal censorship operated under the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. They also explore the effects of informal censorship, whereby playwrights, audiences and managers internalized the censorship regime. As such, the volume moves beyond a narrow focus on erasures and emendations visible on manuscripts to elucidate censorship's wide-ranging significance across the long eighteenth century. Demonstrating theatre archives' potency as a resource for historical research, this volume is of exceptional value for researchers interested in the evolving complexities of Georgian society, its politics and mores.

First published in 2000, this collection of essays focuses on women theatre artists in the romantic period.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2016 “As compelling and entertaining as a detective novel” (The Economist), the incredible true story—part art history and part mystery—of a Velázquez portrait that went missing and the obsessed nineteenth-century bookseller determined to prove he had found it. When John Snare, a nineteenth century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he found a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young—too young to be king—and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to whom the piece was attributed. Snare had found something incredible—but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations. Velázquez (1599–1660) was the official painter of the Madrid court, during the time the Spanish Empire teetered on the edge of collapse. When Prince Charles of England—a man wealthy enough to help turn Spain’s fortunes—proposed a marriage with a Spanish princess, he allowed just a few hours to sit for his portrait, and Snare believed only Velázquez could have been the artist of choice. But in making his theory public, Snare was ostracized and forced to choose, like Velázquez himself, between art and family. A thrilling investigation into the complex meaning of authenticity and the unshakable determination that drives both artists and collectors of their work, The Vanishing Velázquez is a “brilliant” (The Atlantic) tale of mystery and detection, of tragic mishaps and mistaken identities, of class, politics, snobbery, crime, and almost farcical accident that reveals how one historic masterpiece was crafted and lost, and how far one man would go to redeem it. Laura Cumming’s book is “sumptuous...A gleaming work of someone at the peak of her craft” (The New York Times).

Janes Austen was a clergyman's daughter, related to other clergy, born and brought up in the parsonage. Irene Collins examines the influence this had on Austen's work.

Nation and Migration explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture, moving beyond traditional studies of transatlantic literature that focus on what Stephen Spender has described as the "love-hate relations" between the United States and England. By allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, Juliet Shields argues, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In short, Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain's Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectial relationship between nation and migration.

"Jane Austen at Home offers a fascinating look at Jane Austen's world through the lens of the homes in which she lived and worked throughout her life. The result is a refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity."--Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses--both grand and small--of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the one who famously lived a 'life without incident'. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy. Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world’s favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION Selected as a Book of the Year in the Herald In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velázquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile. Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velázquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before.

"A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past 13 centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and places in Britain and demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to studying the subject"--Provided by publisher