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Cassandra Austen, Hugh Kindred, Jane Austen, Jane Austen's "darling Child", Jane Austen's Letters, JASNA, JASNA AGM 2013, JASNA Nova Scotia, Persuasions On-Line, Pride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice 200th anniversary, Sheila Kindred
JASNA Nova Scotia members are meeting on Sunday, February 23rd in Halifax to discuss essays published in the most recent issue of Persuasions On-Line, which includes conference papers on Pride and Prejudice from the 2013 AGM in Minneapolis. The celebrations for Mansfield Park have begun, and the celebrations for Pride and Prejudice aren’t over yet!
Our plan is for each person to choose an essay to focus on. We’ll take turns giving a brief overview (maximum 5 minutes each) of the essays we’ve chosen, with discussion to follow. Sheila and Hugh Kindred are hosting the event. Please let them know if you’re able to attend, and which essay you’d like to talk about. (Or leave a comment here, and I’ll pass on the information to them, and directions to you, as needed.)
Today, January 28th, marks the 201st anniversary of the day Pride and Prejudice was published. Here’s what I wrote last year to celebrate the 200th anniversary, in my post “Jane Austen’s ‘Darling Child’ Meets the World”:
Jane Austen didn’t like the way her mother read Pride and Prejudice aloud. Mrs. Austen read too quickly, “—& tho’ she perfectly understands the Characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought” (Letters, 4 February 1813). Jane writes to her sister Cassandra that she’s grateful for Cassandra’s praise of the novel because she has been having “some fits of disgust” recently. She is at home in Chawton without Cassandra, keeping the secret of her authorship from her neighbours and enduring the irritation of listening to her mother’s interpretation of her characters. She can’t control what other people do with the language of her characters, and she can’t control the errors in the printing: “The greatest blunder in the Printing that I have met with is in page 220—Vol. 3. where two speeches are made into one.” She’s just written one of the greatest books in English literature, and she must know she’s accomplished something very important, but the fact that the book is now out in the world being judged and interpreted by others is making her restless.
Click here to read the rest of “Jane Austen’s ‘Darling Child’ Meets the World.” (This piece was, and still is, the most popular post on my blog.) And here’s the link to the series of blog posts I wrote after that one, about the experience of rereading Pride and Prejudice. Happy 201st anniversary to Austen’s darling child!
Sarah Emsley 
You might enjoy this too Sarah! http://www.culturekicks.co.uk/2013/01/28/a-tweet-universally-acknowledged/
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Very funny! Thanks for the link, Lynn. Mr. Collins gets the best tweets, especially this one: 5* review from @LadyCatherinedeB “I condescend to approve these discourses” SERMONS FROM HUNSFORD Download free today at http://t.co/3P3tKh. I love it! Must have been fun to write.
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I am so envious of the evening you have planned ahead! I have been pouring over your essay on Wharton & Austen. Fantastic reading; thanks for sharing!
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Thanks, Mindi! I’m glad you’re enjoying the essay. I’ve read most of the AGM papers in this issue of Persuasions On-Line and am looking forward to reading the rest and discussing them next month. It’s great to be able to catch up on so many papers since I missed last year’s AGM.
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I’m posting this comment on behalf of Juliet McMaster (who tried to comment here but for some reason it didn’t work). Watch for her new book Young Jane Austen: Studies in her Early Writings – forthcoming from Ashgate!
Dear Sarah,
Thanks for including me in your posting on your meeting for the 201st anniversary of Pride and Prejudice.
I see you and those at your meeting will be discussing some of the papers from the Minneapolis conference. And here I come to explain why, though I gave a paper at Minneapolis, my paper won’t be in POL, nor yet in Persuasions. “Ah, Why her paper is NOT there. That must be a FASCINATING story,” I hear you say.
My paper was called “From Three Sisters to Five: Pride and Prejudice and the Juvenilia.” And it was well attended and we all enjoyed ourselves. (As the title suggests, I talked about “The Three Sisters” as a source, but also “A Collection of Letters,” of course, and “The History of England,” which relates to P&P in fascinating ways.)
As you know I have been working on the juvenilia for a number of years, because of editing them and often illustrating them for the Juvenilia Press. And when Peter Sabor was editing the Juvenilia volume for Cambridge UP, he wrote to say he’d been reading all my stuff, and the pieces ought to be put together as a book. There has been no book by a single hand on the Juvenilia, and now was the time, he said, and I was the person. Well, I wrote with a proposal to my usual publishers, Cambridge UP and Palgrave Macmillan. But both said because so much of the content of such a book had been published before, they weren’t interested.
However, after giving my paper on the juvenilia and P&P at Minneapolis, I decided that with this new essay I might as well try again. This time THREE presses were keen. And I settled with Ashgate, because they said they would do a paperback. So now I’m revising and adding and composing like a mad thing, putting my various pieces together, both published and unpublished, plus new material, into an integrated whole, with a contracted delivery date of March 30.
The “P&P and the Juvenilia” paper was what tipped the scales, evidently. I explained to Susan Allen Ford why I wasn’t sending the paper to her. And she has forgiven me.
At some AGM hereafter, I hope to be flogging autographed copies of Young Jane Austen: Studies in her Early Writings. By ME!
All the best for your meeting – Juliet
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