Berlin-Peck Library Celebrating Iconic Writer's 250th Birthday

BERLIN, CT — The Berlin-Peck Memorial Library, located at 234 Kensington Road, is celebrating a milestone birthday for one of the most beloved authors in literature.

"2025 marks 250 years since this remarkable author came into the world," wrote library officials recently.

On Dec. 16, 1775, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England.

As a result, the library says it has many of Austen's works, including her most famous book, "Emma," available for borrowing. They include:

Written by Jane Austen

Emma

Jane Austen

The classic novel of romance amid polite society follows the adventures of Emma Woodhouse as the young heroine attempts to direct the romantic lives of those around her.

Love And Friendship

Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s Love and Friendship, is an epistolary story, written in 179 when she was fourteen, and dedicated to her cousin Eliza de Feuillide. Featuring improbable coincidences and turns of fate, in form, the story satirizes conventional romance novels of the time, and shows the early development of wit and observation that would make Austen one of the most famous of all British writers.

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen

Jane Austen views the social mores of her day through Fanny Price, a shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations. An outsider looking in on an unfamiliar and often inhospitable world, Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the audience alike.

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen

Six weeks of shopping, taking tea with the most fashionable ladies and dancing with the most handsome gentlemen is what awaits young Catherine Morland when she makes her entree into the leisure society at Bath. But, oh, the thrill of an unexpected invitation from the mysterious Tilney family to stay at their home-a veritable abbey.

Pride And Prejudice

Jane Austen

In late eighteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of three of her four sisters.

Sanditon And Other Stories

Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon (1817) tells the story of a quaint seaside village and its inhabitants. Charlotte Heywood is invited by Mr. and Mrs. Parker to stay the summer with them at Sanditon, where Mr. Parker spent his youth and where he now wants to create a tourist resort. While there, Charlotte gets to know and observe the many colorful residents of Sanditon, including the wealthy, twice-widowed Lady Denham; her ward, Clara Crereton, an impoverished girl; and her handsome, but penniless nephew Edward, who may have eyes for the beautiful Clara. Austen completed eleven chapters before stopping in mid-March 1817, probably because of the illness that eventually took her life.

Sense And Sensibility

Jane Austen

With Mr. Dashwood’s death, his wife and two daughters, Elinor and Marianne, must accustom themselves to genteel poverty. When Marianne meets the man of her dreams, everyone expects a marriage; unaccountably, he rejects her, with devastating effect. It falls to Elinor, the sensible elder sister, to pick up the pieces, while harboring a secret longing of her own. In Sense and Sensibility, the warmth between two very different sisters contrasts with Austen’s deliciously precise observation of vanity, selfishness and snobbery.

Biography and Non-fiction

A Fine Brush On Ivory
An Appreciation Of Jane Austen

Richard Jenkyns

In A Fine Brush on Ivory, Richard Jenkyns takes us on an amiable tour of Austen’s fictional world, opening a window on some of the great works of world literature. Focusing largely on Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, but with many diverting side trips to Austen’s other novels, Jenkyns shines a loving light on the exquisite craftsmanship and profound moral imagination that informs her writing.

A Secret Sisterhood
The Literary Friendships Of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront , George Eliot, & Virginia Woolf

Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but the world’s most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations, such as the friendships between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe or Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these stories of female friendships and literary collaborations

The Best Of Jane Austen Knits
27 Regency-Inspired Designs

Amy Clarke Moore

Knitters obsessed with Jane Austen as well as stitchers just looking for wonderfully appealing projects will fall in love with the beautiful knitting designs. Essays on fascinating aspects of Austen’s life and the regency era round out this inspiring collection. Topics include the places where Austen lived, knitting in Regency England, the yarns available to Austen and her contemporaries, and dressmaking during the time period.

The Regency Years
During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, And Britain Becomes Modern

Robert Morrison

Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

What Jane Austen Ate And Charles Dickens Knew
From Fox Hunting To Whist:the Facts Of Daily Life In Nineteenth-Century England

Daniel Pool

A ‘delightful reader’s companion’ (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Bront s, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England. An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from ‘ague’ to ‘wainscoting,’ the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf
A Rare Book Collector’s Quest To Find The Women Writers Who Shaped A Legend

Rebecca Romney

Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.

Jane Austen
A Life

Claire Tomalin

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen–the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself “formidable,” a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed unfailing loyalty and, in the conduct of her own life, unfailing bravery. In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration.

Jane Austen At Home

Lucy Worsley

A profile of the life and times of Jane Austen tours the classic author’s childhood home, schools, holiday accommodations, and grand and small family estates to reveal lesser-known aspects of Austen’s character and inspirations.

Fiction Based on Jane Austen’s Life and Works

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies
The Classic Regency Romance — Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem

Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith

A mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton– and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

Longbourn

Jo Baker

A reimagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspectives of its below-stairs servants captures the romance, intrigue and drama of the Bennet household from the sideline perspective of Sara, an orphaned housemaid who becomes subject to the arrival of the militia and the attentions of an ambitious former slave.

Jane And The Waterloo Map
Being A Jane Austen Mystery

Stephanie Barron

Jane Austen turns sleuth in this delightful Regency-era mystery.

The Austen Affair

Madeline Bell

Two feuding co-stars in a Jane Austen film adaptation accidentally travel back in time to the Regency Era in this delightfully clever and riotously funny debut.

Written In The Stars

Alexandria Bellefleur

A lighthearted holiday romance inspired by Pride and Prejudice depicts the experiences of a free-spirited social media astrologer who agrees to a fake relationship with a no-nonsense actuary to appease their respective families.

Jane Austen’s Lost Letters
A Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery

Jane K. Cleland

Jane K. Cleland returns with Jane Austen’s Lost Letters, the fourteenth installment in the beloved Josie Prescott Antiques series, set on the rugged New Hampshire coast.

The Emma Project

Sonali Dev

Emma gets a fresh Indian-American twist from award-winning author Sonali Dev in her heartwarmingly irresistible Jane Austen inspired rom com series.

Recipe For Persuasion

Sonali Dev

The author of Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors adapts Jane Austen’s Persuasion in the story of a chef who partners with her celebrity first love during a reality-show competition she hopes will save her restaurant.

Bridget Jones’s Diary

Helen Fielding

A 3-something professional, Bridget Jones tracks her life in her diary. Each entry is an honest and hilarious step in her endless quest for self-improvement.

The Jane Austen Project

Kathleen Flynn

Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved authors: two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel.

The Jane Austen Book Club

Karen Joy Fowler

A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first-century California.

Jane In Love

Rachel Givney

Searching for a radical solution to a lifetime of spinsterhood, Jane Austen is accidentally transported 2 years into the future onto a Hollywood film set of Northanger Abbey.

The Murder Of Mr. Wickham

Claudia Gray

Featuring Jane Austen’s leading literary characters, this mystery follows two young guests at a house party where they attempt to solve the murder of Mr. Wickham, a con-artist with a slew of enemies, before the wrong person hangs for the crime.

The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow

A reimagining of the story of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice spinster, Mary Bennet, finds her navigating limited cultural expectations before embracing her intellectual identity and making her own choices about her future.

Kamila Knows Best

Farah Heron

Too busy with her friends’ love lives, hardly giving thought to her own, Kamila Hussain refuses to let herself get distracted by her growing feelings for a longtime friend of the family until her secret nemesis sets her sights on him.

Miss Austen

Gill Hornby

Moving back and forth between the vicarage and Cassandra’s vibrant memories of her years with Jane, interwoven with Jane’s brilliantly reimagined lost letters, Miss Austen is the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life. With extraordinary empathy, emotional complexity, and wit, Gill Hornby finally gives Cassandra her due, bringing to life a woman as captivating as any Austen heroine.

The Jane Austen Society

Natalie Jenner

A group of disparate bibliophiles bands together in the small English village of Chawton in the hopes of restoring the final home of Jane Austen, revealing their respective losses along the way.

Unmarriageable

Soniah Kamal

A retelling of “Pride and Prejudice” set in modern-day Pakistan finds a practical-minded teacher from a family of sisters evaluating her resolve never to marry after encountering a brusque but compelling man during a series of lavish wedding parties.

This Motherless Land

Nikki May

From the acclaimed author of Wahala, comes a retelling of Mansfield Park, exploring identity, culture, race and love.

Emma
A Modern Retelling

Alexander McCall Smith

Presents a modern rendering of Jane Austen’s classic that follows the experiences of a college graduate who returns to the side of her health-nut father and interferes in the personal lives of her friends.

Pride, Prejudice, And Peril

Katie Oliver

Phaedra Brighton is perfectly content with her life of lecturing college students, gossiping with her best friends, and dreaming of Mr. Darcy. As a young, respected (if somewhat peculiar) English professor, her expertise lies in all things Jane Austen but she knows that the closest she’ll ever get to being a real-life Elizabeth Bennet is in her dreams. With murder on the syllabus and her best friend in dire straits, there’s no Mr. Darcy around to help Phaedra– she’ll have to get to the bottom of this mystery herself.

Pride And Protest

Nikki Payne

Determined to take her neighborhood back from a soulless property developer, DJ Liza B. goes head-to-head with CEO Dorsey Fitzgerald and finds her life turned upside down when her protest results in a viral meme that changes everything, including her feelings for Dorsey.

Me And Mr. Darcy

Alexandra Potter

The manager of a New York bookshop, Emily Albright loves nothing more than curling up with a good book. And, disillusioned with modern-day love, she seeks solace by thinking about the romantic heroes in literature, particularly Mr Darcy. So when she spots an ad for a tour exploring the world of Jane Austen, she books it. Arriving in England a few days later, she discovers her tour is full of old women, and one man, Spike. A foul-tempered journalist, he’s been sent to write a piece on why Mr Darcy’s been voted the man most women would love to date. It’s every woman’s fantasy. Until Emily walks into a room and finds herself face-to-face with Darcy himself. And it suddenly becomes one woman’s reality.

Eligible

Curtis Sittenfeld

Returning with her sister, Jane, to their Ohio hometown when their father falls ill, New York magazine editor Lizzy Bennett confronts challenges in the form of her younger sisters’ football fangirl antics, a creepy cousin’s unwanted attentions and the infuriating standoffish manners of a handsome neurosurgeon.

The Scandalous Confessions Of Lydia Bennet, Witch

Melinda Taub

This lively retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as told from the perspective of Lydia, the much-maligned youngest Bennet sister, is filled with enchantment, intrigue and boundless magic as she comes to learn that, for a witch, promises have power.

This press release was produced by the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.