Dickens

Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday Year & What Teaching Her Taught Me About Life & Writing

/ Rebecca J. Whitman

December 16th, 2025 is Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday. This semiquincentennial celebration has been celebrated all over the world already with special festivals, readings, reenactments, and more. I am pleased to hear she is important enough to even be on a bank note in London now. In Bath, you can visit her museum and book tickets for festivals and experiences. In America, you can learn all about her in the Jane Austen Collaborative including Summer Programs for Teachers and a whole bunch of research and interactive materials. I can only imagine how big the celebration will actually be on December 16th.

Jane Austen is loved in many ways in America. For those of us Janeites who are English teachers, we teach her books in our classes. Pride and Prejudice has been my go to for years in my English 4 class because it my favorite of all of them, but this year I was challenged to find a new book to give some love. I read Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility all at roughly the same time. It was crazy to me how much Austen’s voice and purpose changed in each book. The cadence and flow, the storytelling mastery that I loved in P&P were washed out or gone completely in some of them. The memorable lines of P&P from that opening line to Darcy’s confession of love were just missing entirely in Sense & Sensibility. As a movie, it is close, but as a book, I found myself constantly stopping and restarting to figure out what was happening. Jane Austen shouldn’t be that hard to follow. She was well ahead of her time for engaging her readers.

Jane Austen as sketched by her sister, Cassandra, to whom she wrote many letters. 2025 © Copyright National Portrait Gallery

What surprised me as I read the other books was how much of an activist Jane Austen really was. In Emma, she was well into her career and chose to take on a character she knew she would love more than her readers. Emma is fiesty, independent, and does not need a man. If she falls in love and marries, it is by choice not society’s force. She goes against the customs of her day and embraces her own dreams for her life. From the first page, I found her character very intriguing and modern. It made me love Jane Austen as a writer more because she was taking risks and being a voice for change.

In Persuasion, there was a similar activist purpose. In this book, the main character is dealing with a lot of society pressure to do things and live to certain standards. It cost her a marriage to the man she really loved and overspending made her family have to downsize to become more fiscally responsible. These were big ideas to take on in an Austen novel. Usually social commentary is something you would expect more in Dickens or Bronte, but Austen was finding her way to do it too. It may have taken her getting into a groove and becoming popular enough to afford being able to take a risk, but she still did it.

Northanger Abbey was a surprise of a different kind. In this little book, Austen talks directly to the reader several times about writing! Not only does she reveal some historical shade on reading novels, but she gives her own opinion on the issue in general. She talks about writing and the importance of reading all while showing a character who took her love of reading too far. Northanger Abbey was a coming of age novel. It was a little slow to get into and very dated in the details, but the story did catch our attention. Anything this old that can capture a teenager’s attention deserves recognition.

What Austen Taught Me As a Woman

I have always admired Austen for being a woman who took care of herself and provided a living for herself while she was single and living with family. Austen never married, and that has always made me sad. How could someone write about love and relationships with so much clarity and focus, yet not be able to secure it for herself? Maybe someday I will do a deeper dive into her letters and personal correspondence to get to know Austen better, but for now it is just a dull question in the back of my mind…why?

If anything, I think the answer is in Persuasion. Supposedly Austen had a man pursue her and she wanted to say yes to him, but her family did not approve. Persuasion is a similar story, but with a much better ending. Sometimes I wonder if Austen’s writing wasn’t just trying to make her own happy endings and life choices over again. Why didn’t she show the activism on her pages within her own four walls? Maybe she did and we just don’t know it.

Still, regardless of her love life, Austen was a fierce woman for her time and someone to admire even today. She has left a mark and told us women that we are capable of so much more than our culture may dictate. If I could interview her today, I think Austen’s advice to young women would be “if you have a dream, pursue it; don’t let anything hold you down.”

What Austen Taught Me As a Writer

Reading so many Austen books at once gave me the chance to focus on the common threads between them. I would listen to how the character development progressed and later novels were stronger than early work (with the exception of P&P). I also listened for a familiar structure, cadence, or form. I realized that we writers do develop a style that is pretty hard to get away from no matter what the topic may be. Austen’s style is conversational, approachable prose with a lot of dialogue to show the story more than tell it. l found the books that were good were the ones that did this. The rest were just hard to get into.

I also came to the realization that the really great writers in the world are those that use their platform for good.

Dickens used his writing to encourage reform in society (for example child labor and poverty). Bronte also spoke about education reform and other society issues. Austen entertained us with romance but made us question our society norms at the same time. Women were held back in her time, and her honesty with this repression on the page changed things for women in the future. I believe the great writers like Dickens, Bronte, and Austen were great and unforgettable not just because they were good story-tellers but because they used their skills to make a difference in the world around them. After all, what other purpose can be there be for an artist than to hold a mirror to their world and ask them to make it better?

Santa, Dickens, And The Real Meaning Of Christmas

/ Rebecca J. Whitman / 13 Comments

I remember the first Christmas when I started to wake up from the belief in Santa. I don’t remember how old I was, but I know from the house we were in that I was about in the third grade. Kids were mean back then, as they inevitably always are, so I had most likely been bullied by some classmate for my faith in Old Saint Nick.

The room that I shared with my sister was an enormous one. On the side nearest the hall and the rest of the house was an attached bath with a three-dimensional plaque on the wall of Big Bird from Sesame Street smiling down at me. Opposite the bath was a large bay window that looked out into the yard. Between the two walls were our bunk beds and shelves stuffed with linens, clothes, and toys.  I loved that room.

I remember feeling dismally sad when Christmas Eve came. My sister and I were scurried off to our beds with the advisory that can only be given at Christmas: “You must be in your beds before Santa comes or you may not get your presents”. I was dismally sad because I wasn’t sure there was a Santa to be bringing me presents. I desperately wanted to believe, but I was losing my belief.

At just that moment, I heard sleigh bells coming from the roof of my house! I ran to the bay window in my room and heard them again–louder. This time it sounded like hooves may have been with them. What doubts I had vanished. I flew into bed and pulled the covers over my head, so Santa would find a good girl at my house and leave her presents. Some parents may have climbed on roofs and shaked bells to help their children believe, but mine didn’t. What I heard was as real as it ever could be, and it came at a time when I desperately needed it. Children need to believe in Santa.

There is a wonder and magic to Christmas that hovers in the airy notes of Christmas songs and tastes sweet with Christmas goodies and hot chocolate. It twinkles in the lights on houses and trees. It reflects in the image of every treasured ornament. It laughs with families as they gather and share meals, and as they create tornadoes of torn paper from unwrapped presents. At Christmas it feels like all your best and brightest hopes and dreams can come true. For a moment, they actually do.

But what happens when a child stops believing in Santa Clause? What happens is the child loses their sense of awe and wonder about the world. They can’t dream or aspire to greatness because they can’t imagine a world beyond what they can see or create. They are harder to please and tend to expect everything to be handed to them. They worry constantly about what others think of them, so they spend more time in social media then they do face-to-face and unplugged. Does this sound familiar? We have a lot of Scrooge-like children–and adults–in the world today.

I think the trouble starts when greedy parents want all the glory for the gifts they are giving. They tell the child that they are the ones that bought the gifts with the “from Santa” tags. They tell them this for no other reason than to see all the thankfulness for the gifts be directed to the true person who provided for them.

Another contributing factor to this epidemic is the misguided Christians who tell their children not to believe in Santa because they feel his presence takes away from that of the Christ child. They see the commercialism that comes with Santa as feeding the proverbial sweet tooth of want that most kids have. As the wish lists grow longer, kids step farther away from the true meaning of Christmas and into their own caverns of selfishness and want. I wonder how different Christmas could be if we let it be a learning opportunity to interact with our kids. What if the kind, generous man called Santa giving gifts to others became a spotlight on the fact that God gave the ultimate gift of his Son to the Earth?

I don’t know where Santa is these days, but I know where he isn’t. He’s not in a store increasing sales numbers. He’s not in a movie with no other lines than “ho, ho, ho.” He isn’t in a chapel reveared as a god, nor is he on a name tag borrowed by boozy elves filled with too much Christmas “spirit”. Wherever Santa is, I bet he’s looking at a digitised naughty and nice list–he’s cool with techie stuff like that. I bet he is still eating Mrs. Clause’s cookies with eggnog and giving too many samples to Rudolph and his friends. I bet he is more than a little disappointed by the people on his naughty list and how much longer that list is than the other one. But Santa is nothing if not optimistic; he is still holding out hope for us Scrooges to change.

In the same way, God is holding out hope too. He never intended for us to become embittered by Christmas or enraged by it to rally to a cause. God doesn’t expect his people to tear Santa out of Christmas or, as some are in the habit of doing, refuse to celebrate it altogether. He expects us to love each other and approach the world with childlike innocence and wonder.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a little child and had him stand among them.  And he said: ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. –Matthew 18:1-4, NIV

This is the lesson Scrooge learned himself in the end of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

 “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

This Christmas, may you find yourself learning to see the world through the eyes of a child. May that sense of Christian wonder, awe, and charity guide you through the coming year.