'Among the Janeites': 6 stories from the realm of intense Jane Austen fandom

Deborah Yaffe wondered why Jane Austen inspires such intense fandom. Here's some of what she found.

3. Film set stories

Yaffe went on a Jane Austen tour with other enthusiasts, a journey which included stops in the towns in which Austen set her books, one of Austen's homes, and some of the places where famous Austen movies were filmed. At one point, the group traveled to Mompesson House, which served as the Dashwood family's London house in the 1995 film version of "Sense and Sensibility." The property manager who worked on the movie, Karen Rudd, told the group of an incident in which a parrot that appeared in the film escaped, a big problem in an antique house stocked with very expensive historical objects. "It wasn't a laughing matter at the time," Rudd said.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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