Let's write about how the author Jane Austen was motivated to create her classics

This is a short article is published the in the Fall 2025, Bowdoin College Magazine, (in Brunswick, Maine) by Associate Professor of English Literature Anne Kibbie*. 

I recommend following this seminar for anyone who appreciates a terrific reading group experience with a very scholarly leader. Thanks to Dr. Kibbie for sharing your Jane Austen scholarship. Her Bowdoin College email is at the link to her name above.

Shocking Jane Austen❗ Born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon Hampshire, England, and died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, Hampshire when she was 41 years old, having written novels like Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. She is buried in the Winchester Cathedral.

In recognition of the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, Associate Professor Ann Kibbie says the great novelist's real message goes beyond the world of love and romance.

During the 205th landmark anniversary for the fans of one of the greatest English language novelists, Jane Austen, who wrote about the lives and loves of the British landed gentry from the female perspective was born on December 16, 1775.

Dr. Ann Kibbie is one of her fans who teaches Austen and whose scholarship includes representations of money and capital in early modern literature.

Dr. Kibbie says her favorite response to Austen's work comes from the twentieth cectury poet W. H. Auden.  "He write that, despite the image of Austen as a prim and proper spinster, 'You could not shock her more than she shocks me'.  What did he consider so shocking❓  Her focus on that forbidden of subjects was not romance, but on money," 💰asserts Kibbe.

(No kidding❓😀😉 Who knew❓😮)

*Dr. Ann Louise Kibbie specializes in British Literature of the long eighteenth century. Her areas of research include representations of money and capital in early modern literature; the eighteenth-century novel; sentimentalism and the gothic; and eighteenth-century property law. Most recently, she has focused on the intersections between literature and medical history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her monograph, Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, was published by the University of Virginia Press (Fall 2019).

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2021 for her current project, Fatal Labors: Obstetrics and the Disabled Maternal Body in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain.