In celebration of Portage Tri Kappa’s commitment to further Literacy, Culture, and Education in our community, our Literacy Committee created a Jane Austen tribute, on display at the Portage Public Library during the entire month of November in the glass case near the entrance.
Jane Austen is deemed one of the greatest writers in the English language and her work remains engrained in our literary consciousness. Austen’s major novels continue to dominate literary and popular culture, two centuries after her death in 1817, at the early age of 41. An incredible legacy, considering four of her completed novels were originally published anonymously in her own lifetime, with little success. Today, her six major novels are rarely out of print.
Austen’s six major novels—Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Emma—are considered classics and have endured the test of time to this day. Though renowned for her portrayal of English middle-class life in the early 19th century, Austen’s extraordinary fictional characters have proven to be timeless and universal, touching a human chord in all of us.