LONDON (AP) — Fans of Jane Austen celebrated the acclaimed author's 250th birthday on Tuesday with a church service in her home village, festive visits to her house and a virtual party for those paying tribute from afar.
Thousands of enthusiasts around the world have already taken part in a yearlong celebration of one of English literature’s greats, who penned “Pride and Prejudice," “Sense and Sensibility” and other beloved novels.
On Tuesday — to mark 250 years since she was born on Dec. 16, 1775 — Jane Austen’s House, in the southern English village of Chawton, hosted talks, tours and performances for dozens of visitors. Celebrations concluded with an online party for fans from all over the world.
“Regency dress strongly encouraged,” organizers said, adding that more than 500 people from countries as far-flung as Chile, Kazakhstan and Belarus had signed up for the Zoom party.
The cottage, now a museum with Austen artifacts, was where the author lived for the last years of her life and where she wrote all six of her novels.
“It has been an absolute joy to spend 2025 celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. It has been a year filled with laughter, love, community and inspiration," said Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen’s House. "Here’s to the next 250 years.”
A church service featuring music and readings was held in Steventon, the rural village where she was born.
Fans, who call themselves “Janeites," have marked the anniversary year with Regency balls and festivals staged in the U.K., U.S. and beyond.
Over the weekend, the city of Bath, where Austen lived for five years, hosted the Yuletide Jane Austen Birthday Ball, the finale of many grand costumed events held there this year.
FILE - One of the new British 10 pound notes is posed for photographs outside the Bank of England in the City of London, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, file)
FILE - A sound and light show with a literary theme developed by Luxmuralis, which includes a section on writer Jane Austen, is screened inside Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, England, Tuesday, March 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, file)
NEW YORK (AP) — Christine Baranski was in the playground outside St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, New York, about three years ago when she came across Matthew Guard, artistic director of the Grammy-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble.
“I love choral music,” she told him.
An Emmy- and Tony-Award winning actor, Baranski went on to attend some of his concerts.
“I was a fangirl basically,” she recalled. “And I think we just said, `Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together?’”
Baranski agreed to narrate a music-and-spoken word version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” last December at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which owns the original manuscript of the 1843 classic. A recording was made last June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and released Dec. 4 on the LSO Live label.
She will perform it again with the group on Thursday night at the Morgan, which is displaying the manuscript through Jan. 11, and again the following night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, where she will again portray the acerbic Agnes van Rhijn when Season 4 of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” starts filming season four on Feb. 23.
“I have this thing about keeping language alive, keeping beautiful, well-written language,” she said. “Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. We’re getting awfully lazy in our use of the English language.”
She compliments Julian Fellowes, creator of “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey,” for distinguished prose.
“I think he’d play Agnes if he could,” she said. “He gives her the witty stuff.”
Baranski leaned on the skills that earned her an Emmy for “Cybill” and Tonys for “The Real Thing” and “Rumors.”
“You get to bring to life a lot of different characters, none the least of which is Ebenezer,” she said at the library this month. “It’s wonderful for an actor to differentiate in as subtle a way as possible these different characters. As an acting piece, it’s wonderful. And not many women have done it. It’s been done by Alistair Cooke and Patrick Stewart and Patrick Page and all these great actors — but I get to do it with a chorus.”
Guard weaves in underscoring by composer Benedict Sheehan with Baranski’s words and 10 carols that include “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls” plus “Auld Lang Syne.”
Reciting the entire story would have created a Wagnerian-length evening.
“This manuscript itself is about 30,000 words and we needed about 5,000 to make it a concert length,” Guard said. “I tried to create space in the narrative for obvious musical exclamation points or emotional feelings, almost like arias in an opera.”
Sheehan had worked together with Guard on a 2020 recording “Once Upon a Time” that weaved together the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
“I said why don’t you commission me to write choral underscoring for the narrative that can kind of stitch together these different choral pieces?” Sheehan said.
Baranski got narration experience in 2023 when she replaced Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for Beethoven’s “Egmont.”
“I could do this the rest of my career,” she thought at the time. “Just put me in a concert hall surrounded by great musicians.”
After working with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn, Baranski practiced on Zoom to hone a 19th-century voice and avoid cliché.
“I said this is a good warm up for Aunt Agnes because it’s that kind of speech we were taught at Juilliard,” the 73-year-old Baranski said, recalling lessons from Edith Skinner decades ago.
“Sometimes it’s just a question of modulating your voice, just different rhythms and staccato or legato,” she said. “I want the voice of the Ghost of Christmas past to be disembodied… ethereal.”
She didn’t have an urge to join in on the carols.
“We take from each other,” she said. “When the chorus first heard my version of it, I think it subtly influenced the feeling of it and I take from the mood of the carol and bring it into my interpretation.”
“It’s a really exciting back-and-forth actually,” Guard said. “It’s not really totally clear who’s driving the bus at times.”
Baranski hopes the project has a future.
“We want to film this someday in the Morgan,” she said. “Make this a yearly event at the Morgan, because here’s the manuscript and people. It’s just one of those things like Handel’s `Messiah’ or `The Nutcracker.’”
She’s going to gift the CD to her grandchildren, four boys ranging from ages 2 to 12. Among her previous holiday experiences was portraying Martha May Whovier in the 2000 movie “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“They’re curiously not interested in my even being Martha May in `The Grinch,’” Baranski explained. “Their friends sometimes say: `That’s your grandmother.’ But I just want to be their grandma — do you know what I mean — and not somebody?”
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
