Show notes appear in Part 2 of the From Cottage to the World.

In this episode, the Austen Pod Squad chats with author/artist Kate Evans about her graphic biography of Jane Austen which tells the story of Austen in a highly visual way that tells the story of Austen from birth onward against a historical backdrop and themes of colonialism, slavery, and class in a book that is illustrated in a gentle color palette with embroidery and patchwork quilt motifs.

In 2023, Dr. Wells. Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College, completed a "groundbreaking trio" of books published by Bloomsbury Academic that revolutionizes how we understand Austen’s rise to fame. This trilogy includes Everybody’s Jane, Reading Austen in America , and A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist. Beyond her own writing, she is the editor behind the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, Persuasion and Mansfield Park—specifically designed to be "reader-friendly" for a new generation.

In 2025, she co-curated the major 250th-anniversary exhibition, A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. In this lively podcast, the Austen Pod Squad, co-hosts, Marcia Johnson, Sherry Lockwood, and Jen Mulsow explore collecting, curating, teaching, and student experience in reading Jane Austen in America with Dr. Wells who shares her deep research and vast Austen knowledge with our listeners.

Meg plays musical excerpts from her performance of My Dearest Jane.

Originally from Michigan, Sarah J. Makowski earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Aachen. Her debut book, Bitches in Bonnets: Life Lessons from Jane Austen’s Mean Girls (Prometheus), explores how Jane Austen anticipated modern social scientific findings on female behavior. Called “a must read for Jane Austen fans,” Bitches in Bonnets is a conversational, personal look at Austen’s flawed but loveable female characters. “Hilarious, yet deep and dark at the same time,” Bitches in Bonnets encourages readers to examine their own actions in both literature and life.

Austen Pod Squad Hosts, Marcia Johnson and Sherry Lockwood chat with Sarah Makowski, a member of JASNA Virtual Region, about the Life Lessons from Jane Austen’s Mean Girls and how she came to write the book and how Austen has remained relevant down through the generations. We do not have to ask where all the mean girls have gone, they are still with us. Sarah shares experiences and insights that illustrate that while fashions and technology may have changed, human behavior, to paraphrase, Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, people remain “in essentials very much, I believe, what they ever have been."