No post about her letters this time, but about how ingrained she is in English popular culture. Apart from Shakespeare maybe the only other iconic English writer in this respect (a point I make in the introduction to my book In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters – OUP, 2014).

I was reading Road Rage, a crime novel published by Ruth Rendell nearly thirty years ago, when I came across the following passage:

Has anyone tried this trick in real life, I wonder? Ruth Rendell in any case appeared to think it worked!