“Awesome Jane has been dead for centuries,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, “and there is something so intimate about her style. I feel like she’s talking to me, and strangely enough, only to me.”
My co-editor Liz Philosophos Cooper and I included Coates’s praise of Austen (from a series he wrote for The Atlantic) in our “postscript” collection of quotations for “Unexpectedly Austen,” published on the Jane Austen Society of North America website.
This collection also includes quotations from Kazuo Ishiguro, who calls Austen a “profound novelist” and André Alexis, who says “her work feels contemporary to me” and praises Mansfield Park as “thinking (about order, about status, about transgression) taken to the height of art.” The concluding remarks for “Unexpectedly Austen” are from HRH The Princess of Wales, who sends her “very best wishes to all involved with the Jane Austen Society of North America.”
Liz and I have enjoyed putting these collections together as part of the celebrations of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday.
You can read all the tributes and reflections—including contributions composed especially for our series by Anna Quindlen, Adjoa Andoh, Jeanne Birdsall, George Elliott Clarke, Natalie Jenner, Andrew Davies, Paul Gordon, Shawna Lemay, Amanda Root, Charlene Carr, Isabel Huggan, Amy Sherald, Karen Joy Fowler, and Jane Pek, along with quotations from Dwyane Wade, John Mullan, Taylor Swift, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emmanuel Macron, Marlon James, Brandon Taylor, Chelsea Clinton, HRH Queen Camilla, and many others—on the “Unexpectedly Austen” page on the JASNA website.
We could go back to last January, for example, to Quindlen’s praise of Austen as “the improbable inimitable immortal,” or to April and George Elliott Clarke’s declaration that “Jane Austen is deathless” or to November and Amy Sherald’s remark that Austen offers “a thoughtful challenge to the stories society tells and the ones it overlooks.” I could keep quoting highlights—or I could stop right here and encourage you to read or reread all of the tributes and quotations, in chronological order or reverse chronological order or at random. You could read them all at once or, like the heroine of Tom Gauld’s cartoon “Microdosing Jane Austen at the Office” (reprinted in our November installment), you could “read a line or two … every hour to keep a mild Regency buzz throughout the day.”
I hope you enjoy!
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Here are the links to the last two instalments, in case you missed them:
News about The Austens and upcoming events
CBC Radio Documentary: “Our Jane”
CBC article: “‘Our Jane’: N.S. fans celebrate her 250th birthday, and her Halifax connection”
My debut novel, The Austens, is now available from Pottersfield Press! Order signed copies (personalized, if you wish) from Bookmark (for shipping within Canada) or Woozles (for shipping within Canada and the United States). Order from Jane Austen Books (they’re based in Ohio and accept international orders as well as orders within the United States). The ebook is also available; additional sources are listed here.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2026 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
Sarah Emsley 
