In Jane Austen’s Regency England the winter sun set before 4:00 PM. In Austen’s novels, candles illuminate the Netherfield Ball in Pride and Prejudice and the Christmas Eve party at Randalls in Emma.
In this JASNA-Vermont Zoom presentation, Marti Sterin will share Sue Dell’s 2018 AGM presentation Let There Be Light, which will illuminate for us the way Jane Austen’s characters lit their worlds.
You are Cordially Invited to JASNA-VT’s October Meeting
Featuring actor and scholar Laura Rocklyn
Who Dares to be an Authoress
Sunday, Oct 6, 1:00-3:00pm Charlotte Senior Center, 212 Ferry Rd, Charlotte, VT ******************
The year is 1815, and Jane Austen has just returned from a visit to the Prince Regent’s London residence. The honor of this invitation prompts her to reminisce about the events that led the daughter of a country clergyman to a position of such prominence.
Join us for a dramatic living history portrayal of this moment in Austen’s life.
Laura Rocklyn is an actress, writer, museum educator, and first-person historical interpreter who has performed with theaters across the country.
~ Free & open to the public ~ Light refreshments ~ For more information: Email: JASNAVTregion [at] gmail.com Facebook: Jane Austen in Vermont
Hope you can join us!
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Save the date: Join us for a Jane Austen Birthday Tea on Sunday, December 8 with entertainment by Donna Chaff. The program “Musical Jane” will feature music from the life, novels, and films of Jane Austen with selections chosen from the Austen Family Music Collection.
“Austen Family Theatricals and Jane Austen’s Teenage Dramas“
Sunday, May 5, 1:00-3:00, Temple Sinai, 500 Swift St., S. Burlington, VT
What can we learn about Jane Austen if, instead of asking whether she liked the theatre, we ask what kind of theatre she preferred? Does Aunt Norris speak for Jane Austen when she opines in Mansfield Park that “There is very little sense in a play without a curtain?” Or did Austen prefer to perform, and to write, plays designed for the curtain-less stage that Shakespeare wrote for? How did her encounters with the intense process of planning, rehearsing, and performing a family theatrical influence her writing?
The presentation will include opportunities for audience participation.
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Lesley Peterson is brought to us through a JASNA National Traveling Lecturer Grant. She is the editor of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies and before her retirement was Professor of English at the University of North Alabama. She teaches Shakespeare to children and has published or presented on the drama of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Carey, Margaret Cavendish, Shakespeare, and Tennyson.
~ Free & open to the public ~ Light refreshments served ~
Jane Austen’s Reputation: Highlights of Her First Century in American Periodicals ***********
Magazines and journals published in the United States during the nineteenth century provide an interesting and mixed picture of Jane Austen’s reputation.
Sunday, October 1
2:00-4:00 pm
Richmond Free Library 201 Bridge St, Richmond, VT
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Mary Mintz is the President of Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). She holds two master’s degrees, one in library science and one in English literature with a specialization in nineteenth-century British literature. She is the Associate Director for Outreach, as well as Humanities and Honors Librarian, at the American University Library in Washington DC. As a faculty member at the University, she works closely with history and literature students to support their original research. Before becoming President of JASNA, Mary served in several positions on the Board of Directors, in addition to being a Co-Regional Coordinator of the DC Metropolitan Region of JASNA.
~ Free & open to the public ~ Light refreshments served ~
You are cordially invited to the upcoming JASNA-South Carolina Region event at the Bluffton Library on November 5th. Co-sponsored by the Friends of the Bluffton Library. Hope you can join us!
When: Saturday, November 5, 2022, 2:00 – 4:00 pm What: Talk on “Gender and the Decorative Arts in Jane Austen’s Novels” with Kristen Miller Zohn* Where: Bluffton Library, 120 Palmetto Way, Bluffton, SC
During the Georgian period, women and men alike had a great interest in architecture, interior design, and fashion, and there was an expectation that the concepts of femininity and masculinity would be reflected in these spheres. This slide lecture will present images of decorative arts, interior design, and clothing to explore how those that are presented in Austen’s novels speak to the roles of women and men in her era.
*Kristen Miller Zohn is the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Lauren, Mississippi, as well as the Executive Director of the Costume Society of America.
Please RSVP: jasnavermont [at] gmail.com or the Bluffton Library, 843-255-6503
You are Cordially Invited to JASNA-Vermont’s June Meeting
Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer
“Jane Austen and Autistic Spectrum Disorders: Re-examining some of her characters’ challenges with conversation,
empathy and social interaction from a 21st century perspective”
Sunday, 9 June 2019, 2-4 pm
Fletcher Free Library, Community Room* 235 College St, Burlington VT
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With a degree in speech language pathology from McGill University, Phyllis Fergusson Bottomer has had a long career working with children and adults with communication challenges. A longtime reader of Jane Austen, she has used her professional knowledge to view some of Austen’s most puzzling characters through this lens of social and communication impairment. Her book So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (2007) brought this topic to the fore, and she has travelled the world over to give talks at various Austen society groups and conferences. Active in JASNA as a Board member, Chair of the JASNA Grants Committee, and many years as Regional Coordinator for the Vancouver Region, Phyllis also (along with her husband) has become enamored of English Country Dance and they travel as “dance gypsies” to balls and week-long dance camps all over the continent (and why she is here in Vermont!)
~ Free & open to the public ~ ~ Light refreshments served ~
* If there is no available parking at the Library or on surrounding streets, please note that parking is free on Sunday in the parking garage on Cherry St, a short walk to the Library.
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Upcoming 2019 meetings:
Aug 4: Field trip to the DAR John Strong Mansion, Addison, VT Sept 15: JASNA President Liz Philosophos Cooper on “Jane Austen, Working Woman” Dec 8: Annual Birthday Tea: “What did she say? – Just what she ought…” ~ Proposals in Jane Austen” with Hope Greenberg & Deb Barnum + Dancing with Val Medve and the Burlington Country Dancers
You are Cordially Invited to JASNA-Vermont’s December 2018 Meeting
~ The Annual Jane Austen Birthday Tea! ~
In celebration of the Bicentenary of Persuasion (1818)
Anna Battigelli*
“Landscapes and Soundscapes in Jane Austen’s Narratives”
How does Jane Austen convince us that we are sharing the experience of an individual immersed in society? In part, she does so by showing us what that individual overhears and sees. This talk examines Austen’s narrative technique for its construction of rich and compelling representations of inner life through soundscapes and landscapes.
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Sunday, December 2, 2018, 1 – 4:00 p.m.
Champlain College Morgan Room, Aiken Hall
83 Summit St. Burlington VT**
$35 / person ~ $30 / JASNA Members ~ $10 / student
Registration & advance payment required! ~ Register by 21 Nov 2018!
****************** *Anna Battigelli is a Professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh and the author of Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. She co-edited with Laura M. Stevens a double issue of Tulsa Studies in Literature on “Eighteenth-Century English Women and Catholicism.” Her edited collection of essays, Art and Artifact in Jane Austen’s Novels and Early Writing, based on the “Jane Austen and the Arts” conference she hosted at SUNY Plattsburgh in 2017, will be published in 2019.
Calling all English Country Dancers! Move to joyful music in a relaxed, beginner-friendly atmosphere….
Escape the hub-bub of the modern world and experience how people entertained themselves before TV, Roku, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat!
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The Burlington Country Dancers group is offering weekly classes in English Country Dance for 6 Wednesdays through August, 7 – 9 pm at the Richmond Free Library – July 25, August 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29.
Cost is $5 / class – attend all or just when you can – all are invited, even if you have two-left feet…*
Teaching will be by Val Medve and Martha Kent to recorded music.
Join us if you can!
*Best suited for teens and adults with the ability to walk briskly.
~ You are Cordially Invited to JASNA-Vermont’s September Meeting at the Burlington Book Festival
“Planting the Seeds for the Austen Oeuvre:
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman.” with Nancy Means Wright*
In an illustrated talk, Wright will describe 18th-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s traumatic and unconventional life in an era when women were victims of primogeniture and considered incapable of reason. She will discuss Mary’s groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and her Unitarian publisher’s circle of Dissidents; her years in revolutionary Paris when she lost her head to a feckless American captain – and her voyage to Scandinavia as a lone woman in search of a missing “silver ship.” She will also consider the ongoing question: Was Jane Austen influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft?
Sunday, September 18, 2016 2 – 4 pm Morgan Room, Aiken Hall**
83 Summit Street
Champlain College
Burlington VT
*Vermont author Nancy Means Wright has published fiction with St Martin’s Press, Dutton, Perseverance Press, and elsewhere, including a trilogy of historical mysteries featuring 18th-century Mary Wollstonecraft. Her most recent works are Queens Never Make Bargains, a novel, and The Shady Sisters, a collection of poems. Short stories and poems appear in American Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, Carolina Quarterly, and others. Her children’s books have received an Agatha Award and a grant from the Society of Children’s Book Writers. A former teacher and Bread Loaf Scholar, Nancy lives in Middlebury, Vermont, with her spouse and two Maine Coon cats. Her books will be available for purchase and signing.
* Our Regency Ball features Val Medve and the Burlington Country Dancers, music by “Impropriety” – Aaron Marcus (piano), Laura Markowitz (violin) and Ana Ruesink (viola) – instruction given, all skill levels welcome!
** We ask you to tell us in advance your favorite scene in the 1995 Pride & Prejudice – we will be showing and discussing these during the Tea.
Jane Austen in Vermont 