Jane Austen's 250th: John Mullan asks What Matters in Jane Austen?

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, we are hosting a week of literary events for books on and about the great author!

John Mullan is a professor and previously penned the regular 'Guardian Book Club' column on fiction in the Guardian. He frequently appears on the BBC's Review Show and was asked to judge the 'Best of the Booker Prize' in 2008 and the Man Booker Prize itself in 2009. He has lectured widely on Jane Austen in the UK and abroad.

He joins us to give a talk on Jane Austen and his seminal work What Matters in Jane Austen?

What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? What do the characters call each other, and why? And which important Austen characters never speak? In twenty short chapters, each of which answers a question prompted by Jane Austen's novels, John Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most to the workings of Austen's fiction.

Inspired by an enthusiastic reader's curiosity, based on a lifetime's study and written with flair and insight, What Matters in Jane Austen? uncovers the hidden truth about an extraordinary fictional world.

"Any new book on Jane Austen raises the urgent question, Would I get more pleasure from reading this than from re-reading my favourite Jane Austen novel? If you decide to give What Matters in Jane Austen a chance you'll know after a few pages that you've made the right choice." ~ John Carey, Sunday Times