Jane Austen and the Magazines

Jane Austen's voracious reading of novels and plays is well known. But she is generally thought, however, to have made a deliberate decision to 'keep out' of the popular periodicals and magazines that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The evidence strongly suggests that this was far from the truth. Not only did her brothers famously launch a periodical but Jane Austen read magazines and, after her death, her works were discussed widely in them. This illustrated talk by Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent) looks at Jane Austen's indebtedness to periodicals and her playful reuse of their contents in her novels.