Jane Austen died on this day, 202 years ago, in rented rooms in Winchester, attended by her loving sister Cassandra and under the care of a well-respected local physician.
    Her death was lamented by her friends and family at the time, and we still mourn today for the premature loss of an extraordinary individual and a transcendentally gifted artist.
    We Janeites tend to be very proprietorial about "our Jane," responding with indignation to her critics, and in the case of her death, wishing that there was something more that could have been done. But Dr. Helena Kelly takes this proprietorial attitude to new heights. As I have previously noted, she tends to discount and dismiss any other interpretation of Austen's life and work but her own. And by dismiss, I mean that she calls Austen's own relatives liars and fibbers who didn't understand Austen nearly so well as she does.
     Dr. Kelly suggests that Austen "may" have been killed by her physician with a drug overdose. "She was, I think it's fairly clear, killed with kindness." She further suggests that Austen might not even been fatally ill.
    The nature of her illness was unknown at the time, and various diagnoses have been put forth subsequently. Medicine was of course very limited in those days, but although her "medical attendant" Dr. Lyford was unacquainted with x-rays, CAT-scans and blood tests, he was very well acquainted with death, and I suggest that he could recognize its approach. Shortly before Austen's passing, her brother James wrote to his son to say "Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate... with such a pulse it was impossible for any person to last long."
    After Austen's death, Cassandra described her sister's final days and hours in letters to her nieces and others. Everyone involved in Austen's care, and Austen herself, wrote that she experienced little severe pain during the course of her long illness, except near the very end, when she struggled and was restless. Cassandra, undoubtedly wanting to provide relief, asked her if she felt pain and if so, where, but Austen was unable to articulate an answer. "She was seized again with the same faintness, which was followed by the sufferings she could not describe." Dr. Lyford was summoned and applied something to give her ease."

   Thereafter, Austen was "in a state of quiet insensibility" until her death.
​  Dr. Kelly, recounting this scene in her book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, warns us that we ought not to take Cassandra's version at face value for "this kind of text is always suspect. Lies cluster to death like flies." Kelly declares that it is not a foregone conclusion that Austen's malady was fatal or that her end was near: ​"We may have to consider the --frankly horrifying--possibility that Jane's illness wouldn't, on its own, have proved fatal, or not so soon, that it might have been the drugs, and only the drugs, that killed her."

    Was Austen in fact merely quite ill and not at death's door? Based on the description left to us, I believe she was dying. Literature is actually filled with descriptions of "final death throes" and "final struggles." It is a well-documented fact that death is often preceded with an acute period of restlessness. The following explanation from a hospice website exactly parallels what Cassandra wrote:
Shortly before death some people become restless, agitated and confused, however, they are usually unable to tell us why. This is known as terminal restlessness and it often occurs within the last few days of life and affects nearly half of all people who are dying.
   There may be a variety of causes for this and sometimes sedative drugs are needed. A calm, quiet and stress-reduced   environment, with reassurance from those who are close to the person, can often help to relieve this symptom.
​    I witnessed this phenomenon myself during the recent death of a family member who chose to die at home. Cassandra's description strikes me, based on my experience, as exceedingly accurate, down to the detail of the dying person lying in an awkward position, despite one's best efforts to help them get comfortable.  After our relative spent an miserably restless night, trying to climb out of bed when he could no longer support himself, we anxiously called the hospice care team. The nurse came and explained that this was a sign that the end was coming. Fortunately, the restlessness soon subsidized, and my relative passed away less than 24 hours later.
    Seeing your loved one thrash about murmuring on their death bed is a harrowing experience and naturally you would want to ease their suffering with  pain medication. But it does not follow that whatever dose Austen received was entirely responsible for the stillness which followed the period of restlessness--again this is a natural part of the dying process.
   I see nothing suspicious about Austen's end and no reason to assume, as Dr. Kelly suggests, that Austen's "depressed respiration" at the end was due to an opiate overdose and not Cheyne-Stokes breathing, which is another extremely common and widely-reported harbinger of approaching death.
    It would be charitable to lay Dr. Kelly's eagerness to accuse others of a crime, where no crime occurred, to her respect for Austen and her wish, which we all share, that she had been as long-lived as the rest of her family.

You do a podcast with the kind, lovely, bubbly Kristin, talking about  Jane Austen, and she asks if you have a blog, and you say, "Yes, but I seldom post," and it doesn't even occur to you -- not for a whole week -- to blog about the podcast. It's my favourite Jane Austen podcast, "First Impressions" and I really had a great time.
We talked about inspiration, being self-published authors, how to drop historical information into the narrative (exposition) without being obvious about it, and more! 
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https://firstimpressionspodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-36-writing-jane-austen-fan-fiction-with-lona-manning/

  For the last four years, my husband and I have been in China at Christmastime. I opened up the trunk that holds our Christmas decorations after an absence of four years, and pulled out the familiar, and the half-forgotten, ornaments for a Canadian Christmas. We've got a turkey and cranberry jelly and all the trimmings that were not available to us back in China.
  People ask me, "are you happy to be home?" and the answer is, I miss China and my life there and my friends. A lot. I miss the crazy, bustling streets and the little children in their grandparents' arms and watching all of the changes of a developing economy.
  Although Christmas is just another working day in China, we had lots of Christmas joy and wonderful experiences. We forced students to sing the 12 Days of Christmas, Ross was Santa Claus, and we ate dumplings in an unheated school cafeteria instead of Christmas dinner and we were perfectly happy.
  Of course we knew we were living in a dictatorship. But compared to the bad old days of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, China had made so much progress in terms of individual liberty. We hoped that it would continue to do so, since the benefits were apparent and obvious. 

  But during my last year in China, I noticed a change in the atmosphere. The central government was asserting itself more and more. Communist-red slogans and public art blossomed on every other street corner (see example below). My school put up big red banners, extolling the so-called socialist virtues. As you can see, these virtues are Good Things that have nothing in particular to do with Socialism, most especially the virtue of "democracy." 

    And now, for the first time I can recall, Canadians are being cast as the Bad Guys in an international dispute. Up to now, Canadians were welcomed everywhere because we're 'not Americans.' This will have an impact on the numbers of Canadians interesting in going to teach in China; though how great of a one remains to be seen.
  I am no longer able to teach in China because I'm over 60. That regulation in itself has cut off a significant number of people who would gladly work in China as a post-career adventure. The news that China is incarcerating as many as a million of its own Muslim citizens in re-education camps and stepping up the persecution of Christians will also cause more people to give China a pass. That's a big loss for all concerned and I hope the pendulum swings back to opening-up and modernization.
  I wouldn't trade my time in China for anything and no matter what you hear about China, remember that the government is one thing and the amazing, kind, wonderful people of China are something else again.

My website was knocked off line for a few weeks, but I think the technical problems have been sorted out and we're up and running again.

I'm glad to be able to tell you about a new anthology of Austen-inspired Christmas stories, put together by Christina Boyd of Quill Ink. Yuletide is a fundraiser for Chawton House, the former manor house of Jane Austen's brother, Edward Austen Knight. Chawton House now hosts the Centre for Early Women's Writing and holds many rare volumes. You can read more about Chawton House in Deborah Yaffe's enjoyable book, Among the Janeites. 

Christina assembled this project in less than a month and seven Austenesque writers, including me, contributed Pride & Prejudice themed short stories for it. I am just delighted with how well the anthology is being received. 

Yuletide makes a perfect Christmas gift for the Janeite in your life.