Jane Austen July 2025 discussion

I hope you've all had a lovely Jane Austen July! What have you all been reading and what was your highlight of the month?

This July I reread: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and some of Jane Austen's juvenillia; and read Unequal Affections, Marriage and Eavesdropping of Jane Austen's England. I watched the 2008 Sense and Sensibility and the Youtube webseries From Mansfield With Love.

My highlights were probably rereading Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park - and reading Unequal Affections, which was fantastic too!

I read The Annotated Sense & Sensibility edited by David M. Shapard. The annotations were interesting when he discusses romanticism and Marianne's behavior and also when he breaks down how much each of the characters is worth based on purchasing power.

I watched a 1980 adaptation of Northanger Abbey. The only good thing about it is that it was filmed in Bath and it has a VERY good scene of bathing. I really liked seeing bathing come to life. I've only seen pictures and chose not to visit the expensive spa in Bath. (The baths depicted in the novel are no longer there and the building houses the Roman Bath museum).

I'm almost done with Jane Austen: A Companion and The Illustrated Letters of Jane Austen. I started watching "From Mansfield with Love" but it's boring me even more than the original novel.

To continue my Austenesque reading, today I picked up Unmarriageable, a modern day retelling of Pride & Prejudice set in modern day Pakistan.

well, I didn't finish Northanger Abbey on time, so I failed the challenge, but had fun reading and interacting with other people's reactions to the books

I read Persuasion for the first time and really enjoyed it. That love letter! I also listened to Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley on audio book. I know Jane's stories so well, but I didn't know much about her own. Thanks for the rec Katie!

I watched the 2007 and 1995 films of Persuasion. The 2007 film was so frustrating! Why was Anne staring and crying at the camera all the time? The 1995 film was much better and I would recommend that one. I read Northanger Abbey earlier in the year and watched the 2007 film. Such a fun adaption.

Overall, I think I had a successful Jane Austen July :) A huge thanks to the creators!

I enjoyed the challenge and had a fun July reading, but I didn't hit all the points!

I didn't do 4 or 5 and I really lament not doing that 5. Read a book by a contemporary of Jane Austen. Well, something to do down the line.

As for my favorite, well, haha, besides all of it was reading Lady Susan for the first time. Stylistically, it's not her best work, but that Lady Susan character was something else. I would've liked Austen to have written a novel in her third person style with such a character.

That book also had her two novel fragments, with Sanditon being my favorite of the two because it seems different.

I knew a lot about Austen's life from here and there, but had never read a full biography. I read Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley and its analysis of her work, time, and life was really good and thoughtful.

Continue with these Austen readings as a yearly thing and I'll play along. :D

Well, I technically completed the challenge, but I didn't get to a lot of the prompts. I reread Northanger Abbey (third time) and I read What Matters in Jane Austen?, which I liked a lot. Maybe next year I'll plan a bit better!

I did enjoy the two books I read and though I already knew quite a lot of the themes explored in What Matters, I liked how the author connected the various themes over all of the novels. I did find it odd that the theme of letters was not explored, since they play such a huge role in several of the novels, but maybe that's a theme that is too complicated for a relatively short essay. Anyway, it was fun and I enjoyed the videos that were made by people participating in the challenge.

I think I did pretty well for my first Jane Austen July - I read Sense and Sensibility and Emma, Mr. Knightley, and Chili-Slaw Dogs. I watched Bridget Jones' Diary. I tried to watch Pride and Prejudice (the version with Colin Firth) but the first DVD in the series refused to cooperate! :( Definitely planning to join again next year!

Deborah wrote: "I read Persuasion for the first time and really enjoyed it. That love letter! "

Yes! Capt. Wentworth will forever be my favorite Austen hero for that letter. That is the one and only revision we have to one of her manuscripts and it was a smart choice. The cancelled chapters don't have the same impact.
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pc...

I refuse to acknowledge that awful not Persuasion that aired on TV in 2007. The 80s version is OK but the best one is with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds.

Charla Do you have Netflix? Pride and Prejudice is supposed to be there. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) is supposed to be there too.

I read Emma (for the first time in the original English) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also read Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley, after hearing Katie highly praising it on YouTube, and I absolutely loved it!

I also watched the 1971 BBC Sense and Sensibility adaptation, which was, well, far from perfect, but I've run out of recent Austen adaptations to watch...!

I enjoyed my first JAJ enormously and completed all the reading prompts. I reread Sense and Sensibility for the first time in years. It is not one of her main novels that I turn to automatically and it was good to be prompted to revisit it. It was funnier and more subtle than I remembered. Longbourn was fun, catching the intersections with P&P. What Matters in Jane Austen was really excellent. A great recommendation from Katie that made me want to reread the other five main novels forthwith. The Watsons was a frustrating pleasure as it ended all too soon. I finally got around to reading Frankenstein as my contemporary choice. If only Mary Shelley could write as well as Jane. I think the best thing about the experience, apart from all the videos and discussions of course, was being encouraged to do a sequence of interconnected reading. I am normally quite the flibbertigibbet about my reading as I like variety but found it stimulating in a different way to follow a thread through five books.

Jane Austen: A Companion is a good reference book to have on hand or for beginning Jane Austen readers unfamiliar with her life and times. It would be better if the pictures were interspersed throughout the text or if the print wasn't so dense. I've been reading Jane Austen blogs for a long time and this is basically the same thing but harder to read. I may buy a copy for my reference shelf anyway when I need to do a quick lookup and my computer is off.

completed all the challenges except for the modern retelling film/tv one(about halfway through Emma Approved)! I finally read Jane Austen's History of England which was really witty, Castle Rackrent was my contemporary of Austen and it made me interested in reading more from that author next year. I also read Jane Austen's England by Roy Adkins which Katie recommended and I quite enjoyed, some of the topics covered were both fascinating and horrifying. It also made me add several more non-fictions to my Want To Read shelf for next year's July. Can't wait for next year!

I remembered Northanger Abbey too well to reread it again, and the same happened with some other books as What Happened in Jane Austen and Jane Austen at Home (which are great!).
So I only reread Sense and Sensibility and rewatched the 2009 Emma tv adaptation, enjoying both immensely, as well as the read-alongs. Tried to watch the 1971 Sense and Sensibility tv series too, which is in youtube, but couldn't stand more than ten minutes. Maybe I'll search for some modern retelling instead :)

Well, I completed the challenge! This July I read Mansfield Park (I loved it very much), Sanditon, My Dear Cassandra (Jane Austen's selected letters), A Memoir of Jane Austen, Longhorn, Radcliffe's "A Sicilian Romance, Burney's "Evelina", and Watched "Mansfield Park", "Bride and Prejudice", "Becoming Jane", "The Jane Austen Book Club".

Maan wrote: "Well, I completed the challenge! This July I read Mansfield Park (I loved it very much), Sanditon, My Dear Cassandra (Jane Austen's selected letters), A Memoir of Jane Austen, Longhorn, Radcliffe's..."
Good work!