Reading Jane Austen on her Semiquincentennial Birthday
2025 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Many around the world will be reading or rereading some or all of Jane Austen’s six complete novels, the novella and the two novel fragments.
In the coming year, watch for additions to the already sumptuous array of films inspired by Jane Austen. A recent one, however, the Netflix 2022 version of Persuasion, did not feel quite right to me, and is one of the reasons I pitched a stage adaptation to the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. I’m on my second year of development of the play, which will have a Collider Festival reading in June 2025.
Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last novel, is my favourite because it heralds a new era of meritocracy, where anything is possible from season to season: love, like friendship, can be lost and found again. It’s the story of Anne Elliot, at 27, unable to forget her first attachment and ruptured engagement to Frederick Wentworth almost eight years before. Now a Captain in the English Navy, her beloved returns triumphant over the defeat of Napoleon, looking for marriage with anyone but her. The estranged former lovers find themselves in constant close company, excluded, injured, and pressured by others, or separated and disturbed until both hearts are finally opened, understood, and rejoined for all time.
For research, last summer I toured England, to the places Jane Austen lived or visited, which are settings for her novels. In Persuasion, particularly, place is a changemaker and as Anne Elliot reveals her true self, so does her love, Wentworth. Austen’s voice for both women and men is still highly relevant today, and she meets you whatever your age or circumstance, which is why rereading her is so rewarding. Her precision, ironic stance, wit and exceptional dialogue are some reasons I love Jane Austen’s work, but every reader and writer will connect in their own way.
— Katherine Koller writes for stage, screen, and page. Stage plays include Coal Valley, The Seed Savers, Last Chance Leduc, and Riverkeeper. Books are Voices of the Land, plays; Art Lessons, a novel; and Winning Chance, short stories, winner of a High Plains Book Award. Short fiction has appeared in Grain, Room, Epiphany, Alberta Views, LitSphere, EDify, and Through the Portal, and a new collection of short stories, Earthen, is upcoming in spring 2026. Katherine is a founding producer of Edmonton Script Salon, a monthly new play reading series in its twelfth year, and a returning member of the Citadel Playwrights Lab working on an adaptation of a novel by Jane Austen. www.katherinekoller.ca
You can read Katherine Koller's story "Buckshot" in Issue 303 (Spring 2025). Order the issue now:
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