Jane Austen is one of English literature’s most popular classic authors, among both scholars and general readers. And yet, nearly 200 years after her death, we’re still struggling to put a face to her name. The only two authenticated Austen portraits are this drawing, by her sister Cassandra, and a painting based on that image from 1870, over 50 years after the writer’s death in 1817. So it’s big news indeed that Austen biographer Dr. Paula Byrne may have stumbled upon another portrait of her subject.

As the Guardian reports, Byrne’s husband bought the graphite drawing — thought to be an “imaginary portrait,” with the words “Miss Jane Austin” scrawled on the back — at auction. But the picture dates to 1815, decades before Austen achieved posthumous fame, raising the question of why anyone would have made an imaginary drawing an unknown author. Two of the world’s top three Austen scholars believe the portrait is real, and Byrne hopes that the new image will change the way the world sees the writer, presenting “a woman very confident in her own skin, very happy to be presented as a professional woman writer and a novelist, which does fly in the face of the cutesy, heritage spinster view.” Read more about the portrait and see a larger version of it at the Guardian.

This past week, Jack Kerouac’s first-ever novel, The Sea is My Brother, was finally published 40 years after his death. The novel, long thought to be lost by experts, was unearthed in Kerouac’s personal archive by his brother-in-law. We are constantly inspired by the way that our over-processed world still hangs on to its secrets, and even more by the way that bits of history can hide in plain sight, so to celebrate this newest development in the literary canon, we decided to take a look at Kerouac’s newest/oldest book and other lost novels that were eventually found again. Click through to see our list of lost and found novels, and if you’ve ever had a literary relative, get ready to go hunting in your attics for your own treasure chests. Read More »

Nearly two centuries after her death, it’s still unclear what killed Jane Austen. Biographers have attributed Austen’s demise to everything from Addison’s disease to bovine tuberculosis to Hodgkin’s disease, any of which could have caused the year-and-a-half-long illness she endured before dying at 41 in 1817. But now, a crime novelist is floating a much more intriguing theory — that Austen died of arsenic poisoning. The Guardian reports that Lindsay Ashford stumbled upon a collection the author’s letters while at work on a book and noticed that the symptoms Austen described in her final months matched with her understanding of arsenic’s effects. It turns out that a strand of the author’s tested positive for the substance.

Now, even if Austen’s death was arsenic-related, that doesn’t mean she was murdered; a doctor might well have prescribed a medicine containing the element, which was widely used at the time. But Ashford — who has written a new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, based on her findings — doesn’t think homicide is out of the question. “Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder,” she told the paper. “In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn’t until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic.” Read more about Ashford’s investigation and Austen’s mysterious death at The Guardian.

It’s a well-known fact that authors, for all their brilliance, can be less than visionary when it comes to coming up with titles. We understand — so much goes into the perfect title, both from an artistic and a commercial point of view, and when you’re so close to the work at hand, we can imagine how it could be a little challenging to see the issue from all angles. But even if a writer is particularly talented at title-penning, the names of books can go through as many permutations as the text itself before they see the light of day. Plus, for good or ill, writers have husbands, wives, publishers and others to weigh in, causing even more changes. Lovers of book trivia, read on: after the jump you’ll find our list of what some classic works were almost called. Check it out and let us know whether you think the changes were for the better or the worse in the comments. Read More »

Writers get a bad rap in the looks department: if you spend your time holed up and scribbling away, you must be a scrawny, pasty artist type, mustn’t you? Not so! There are a plethora of attractive and well-formed writers, both in history and today, that completely demolish such stereotypes, and whose likenesses we’ve collected here. Now don’t get us wrong — of course we believe that the stuff in their heads is much more important that the shape of their heads (or the shape of their bodies, for that matter) but that doesn’t mean we can’t applaud them for excelling in multiple areas. Plus, it’s well past time to make literature sexy again, and if writers can replace actors as pinups in our culture of ogling, we’ll be happy campers. We’ve tried to pick some contemporary authors as well as some more classic choices, and an equal number of men and women, just to be fair to everyone. Click through to see the authors we think have the best literary figures in history, and make sure to tell us your own picks in the comments.

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Under the influence of characters, setting, and plot, a number of artists have recently taken it upon themselves to recreate book covers of some of the most beloved literature, often with fantastic results. Whether it be through illustration or painting, collage or embroidery, reimagined cover art isn’t limited to the cardboard backings of books, but takes on a life of its own that ranges from extravagant and crafty, with kaleidoscopic-colored thread twirling on the page, to simple but powerful, with bold graphic designs and eerie color pallets. And while each piece is aesthetically different, these book covers have one thing in common — they all pay homage to the authors and works we hold so dear. See 20 of our favorite works inspired by the likes of J.D Salinger, The Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl after the jump.

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We’ve seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even an XXX version of the novel. Hell, Jane Austen even has her own fight club. So it’s not entirely surprising to see Forbes report that she’s now been transformed into a video game heroine. Designed by an app developer called Feel Every Yummy, Word Fighter pits friends or strangers on mobile devices against one another in a race to spell words quickly, using a Boggle-style board. The developers characterize their Jane as “a bad-ass version of Princess Peach… At a glance, she appears to be a very prim and proper lady — as you can see in her portrait — but when it’s time to throw down, she’s ready to destroy you.” Other familiar-sounding characters include J.D., Agatha, and Edgar. Watch a video of Word Fighter in action after the jump.

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Today at Flavorpill, we considered starting a collection of celebrity finger puppets. We wished that we could get our hands on Jane Austen’s unpublished manuscript for a novel called The Watsons that’s going up for auction at Sotheby’s in London tomorrow — but sadly, we don’t have $330,000 to spare. We wondered if Rolling Stone’s “Rock Stars Who Look Like Wizards” will be the silliest Harry Potter-related feature that we’ll see all week. We watched a very young Louis C.K. do stand-up at Caroline’s in the early ’90s. We felt kind of sorry for Tom Green, who has emerged from the depths of obscurity to claim that he invented “planking.” We were kind of excited by the rumor that Kanye West will show a collection at New York Fashion Week in September. We couldn’t help but think that this Ryan McGinley lawsuit was kind of ridiculous. And finally, were thrilled to read that Errol Morris is making a film with Paul Rudd and Ira Glass. Is there any way that it won’t be likable?

Today at Flavorpill, we were surprised that both Jane Austen and William Shakespeare failed to make the cut in this list of Americans’ favorite British authors. We found out what our favorite ’80s band says about us. We wondered what an ad for Zookeeper was doing hanging out in an old episode of How I Met Your Mother. We took a black and white photo tour of old school Harlem. We felt inspired by this open letter to aspiring artists from Pixar animator Austin Madison. We were amused by the changes made in this abbreviated and simplified version of The Great Gatsby. We saw how easy it is to drop $1 million at Tiffany when you’ve got a ten-point action plan. We wondered how Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s short story collection will compare to James Franco’s. We were surprised to find out that Eminem is the first artist to sell 1 million downloads of an album. And finally, we loved Laura Miller’s feature on the Invisible Library and the greatest books that never were. Do you have a favorite imaginary book?

1. Vulture reports that super star composers T Bone Burnett and Danny Elfman will join forces to score Gary Ross’s highly-anticipated film adaptation of The Hunger Games. They say that you can expect the soundtrack to be “sophisticated, cerebral, soulful, and rebellious,” which would normally elicit an eye roll from us, but considering their resumes, we’ll make an exception.

2. Fans of Neil Gaiman should not expect HBO’s adaptation of American Gods to follow the book exactly. Says Gaiman: “The plan right now is that the first season would essentially be the first book, with divergences. You don’t want the people who’ve read the book to be able to go, ‘I know everything that’s going to be happening.’ Well, no. You know a lot more than anybody who is starting from here, but we will do things that will surprise you, too.” [via Zap2It]

3. Ai Weiwei’s mom says that Chinese authorities are now seeking nearly $2 million in fines and unpaid taxes from her son, who was recently imprisoned over the issue for three months. Ai’s disputing that number, and demanding that his accountant, who is still being detained, be released in order to help him deal with the situation. [via The Daily Beast]

4. Lil Wayne says that he plans to retire when he hits his 30s — which is only a few years away. “I’m bowing out still on top, I’ll make you all want me when I retire,” he told XXL magazine. “I honestly think [my career] is unfair to my kids. Honestly this is the real truth. So about 30, 31, 32, I got to get ready [to retire].” We’ll believe it when we see it. [via NME]

5. For some reason, this makes us extremely pleased: According to new findings from Ancestry.com, Kate Middleton (or rather, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) and Jane Austen are eleventh cousins, six times removed. [via People]

Bonus link: Screen Rant’s 20 Favorite Movie Robots