The Jane Austen Society of North America have their AGM in a few days time – Jocelyn Harris will be speaking as the Carol Medine Moss Keynote Speaker, her topic being “Magnificent Miss Morland“. Here is the abstract of her talk:
Jocelyn Harris, professor emerita at the University of Otago, New Zealand, is well-known worldwide for her lectures on Jane Austen. She has also presented papers at conferences in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan, and given dramatized readings of Jane Austen with Terry MacTavish. A scholar of eighteenth-century and women’s literature, Harris has written three books on Austen: Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989), A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” (2007), and Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017). All three seek to illuminate elements of Austen’s creative process, exploring her allusions to other authors and works, studying the surviving manuscript of Persuasion for clues to her real-life heroes, and following the turns of her mind by means of the newspapers she perused, the gossip she heard, the streets she walked upon, and the sights she saw. It is Harris’s quest to “always try to catch Jane Austen in the act of creation by finding out what she read, what she saw, and what she made of it all.” In her talk at our AGM, “Magnificent Miss Morland,” she plans to discuss Catherine Morland’s remarkable truthfulness and strength as qualifications for her “heroine” status.
More information on the theme of “200 Years of Northanger Abbey” here.
