2013 was an exciting year. In June, I spoke about Jane Austen’s satire at a conference on eighteenth-century women writers, held to mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of Chawton House Library. In October, I gave a curtain-raiser” at JASNA in Minneapolis, entitled “Introducing the Real Elizabeth Bennet.” It was delightful to see so many good friends again. On the way, I stopped off to see Janine Barchas, and spent a happy afternoon team-teaching postgraduates with her. Seeing that I was already so far from home, I rounded off my travels with a talk about eighteenth-century Englishwomen at the Tokyo Woman’s Christian University: “Style, Slavery, and Shopping.”
And now for 2014! In April-May I talked about the relation of “Mansfield Park” to Maria Edgeworth’s “Patronage” and Burney’s “Wanderer” at a delightful seminar in Sydney, organised by Jacquie Grainger. Then off to the US to talk about “The Watsons” at a meeting hosted at the sumptuous old Union League by the Philadelphia branch of JASNA, and on to Minnesota to talk about “Jane Austen’s Satires on the Royal Family” to the Minneapolis branch. Thank you Elizabeth Steele and Gail Parker for your generous hospitality.
In June, we acted Robert Moss’s play, “Lady Susan” in Dunedin, and in October, I addressed the newly-formed Wellington branch of the Jane Austen Society of Australia about “Dorothy Jordan, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Bennet” before flying on to Montreal. At the Burney Society of North America, I provided comic relief as the superstitious maid in a reading of Fanny Burney’s “Love and Fashion,” then gave a paper on “Jane Austen and the Subsciption List to ‘Camilla.'” There I suggested that Austen, alerted to Burney’s anxiety about procuring subscriptions by her relative and Burney’s neighbour, Mrs. Cooke, might have urged her friends and relations to subscribe. That article will appear in “Persuasions On-line” in December 2014. My thanks, as always, to Susan Allen Ford and her copy-editor Carol Moss. They and their team ensure that “Persuasions” remains a first-rate professional journal.
For the JASNA AGM, I presented “Fanny Burney and Fanny Price,” arguing that Austen’s inside information about Burney at Court could have contributed to her novels, before talking to the New York chapter of JASNA about Jane Austen’s satires on the royal family. Thank you Linda Dennery! Soon I will go to Sydney for the David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, to tell them about Fanny Burney and Fanny Price.
It’s been great, as always, to see old friends and make new ones. JASNA was just terrific, thanks to Elane Bander and her team. I will always remember the talk by Patrick Stokes, standing tall in the gold-embellished uniform of a Rear-Admiral of the Red like his ancestor Charles Austen. His riff on what a Health and Safety Officer on board the “Victory” at the battle of Trafalgar might have said was a knockout. Another highlight was Lynn Festa’s exquisite and eloquent talk on “The Silence in ‘Mansfield Park,'” quite simply one of the best I have ever heard. JASNA is indeed the place to be for new and exciting readings of Jane Austen.
My new book, “Satire, Celebrities, and Politics in Jane Austen” is coming together nicely. Cambridge University Press has kindly kept “Jane Austen’s Art of Memory” in print, and Rowan and Littlefeld are doing the same for “A Revolution almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion.” Jane Austen Books have copies at a good rate.
