Marriage

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JASNA-Vermont’s Annual Jane Austen Birthday Tea!

You Are Cordially Invited to JASNA-Vermont’s Annual Jane Austen Birthday Tea!

 

December approaches and our thoughts turn to…Jane Austen’s Birthday and Tea!

This is just a reminder that the annual Jane Austen Birthday Tea is coming up on December 8 at the Essex Resort and Spa. There will be Food! Dancing! Jane Austen’s Proposals!

Here are the details:

December 8, 2019

1:00-4:30

 

The Essex Resort and Spa

70 Essex Way, Essex Junction, VT

 

$35 for Members / $40 for Non-members / $15 for Students (w/ID)

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The afternoon will include:

  • Full English Tea with finger sandwiches, assortment of sweets, scones, and, of course, tea,
  • English Country Dancing for all who would like to, no experience necessary, taught and led by the illustrious Val Medve,

  • A talk by Deb Barnum and Hope Greenberg on “Proposals in Jane Austen: ‘What did she say?… Just what she ought'” – enlivened with a visual journey through these scenes as played out in the various Austen film adaptations,
  • and, good company—no, the “best company” with “clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation.”

Regency dress is encouraged but not required!

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Please click here for the reservation form: Dec Tea 2019-Reservation form-final and send it with your payment to the address noted on the form. Registration closes on November 23. 

Hope you can join us! 

c2019 Jane Austen in Vermont
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For Better, For Worse

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A compendium of Austen characters, relatives, friends and neighbors highlight Hazel Jones’ look into the subject of Jane Austen & Marriage. As the book proceeds through the steps of acquaintance, engagement, marriage, and even separation, Jones fleshes out the interaction between man and woman in nineteenth-century Britain. Illustrative excerpts from the novels and primary research sources provide a well-rounded, informative basis for her walk up the garden path and down the aisle.

Examining, chapter by chapter, components of relationships, the book begins with “Choice.” We learn that both sexes could, in fact, choose to opt out of the game. Concerns over continual childbearing and the risk of death, some women made the choice to remain single. Due in part to the shortage of men on the homefront (thanks to the Napoleonic Wars), others found the choice made for them. Men in a position to marry, on the other hand, sometimes thought about their incomes and the demands a growing family would make upon it before contemplating marriage. Therefore, the idea of choice concerns much more than the selection of a life-partner.

Jones’ next chapter brings up the point of how “the question” might actually be popped: in person, via letter, via an intermediary. Sadly, she finds little — in conduct literature or letters — to indicate the “traditional” down on bended knee type of proposal. Few readers will have delved into letters and diaries from this period; the timid suitors who chose the letter/intermediary route might therefore come as a pleasant surprise.

Discussions of conduct books point up the idea that such items existed because no one conducted themselves as they “ought” to have done. By looking at the paramount examples valued by these conduct books and juxtaposing them with the reality of relationships recorded in letters, diaries, and biographies, readers realize just how much Austen’s novels were signs of their times.

Two minor points that the writer and/or editor should have attended to are the spellings of Longbourne and Lizzie in place of the standard Longbourn and Lizzy. The fault may lie with Jones’  use of the Penguin edition of Austen novels.

Jane Austen & Marriage may supply few totally new revelations, but as a compendium of love, courtship, and marriage in Austen’s era (as well as family), Jones has provided a particularly useful book. Readers will welcome the author’s friendly style of writing as well as her insight into women like Lydia Bennet, Anne Elliot, and Marianne Dashwood. Highly recommended.

Four full inkwells.

 (for more on this book, see Two Teens in the Time of Austen, my research blog)

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On My Booklist ~ ‘Jane Austen & Marriage’

A new book alert:  Jane Austen & Marriage by Hazel Jones, to be published in July 2009, is now available for pre-order.

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Jane Austen & Marriage

by Hazel Jones

Continuum Books, 2009

 “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” –Pride and Prejudice

Description:

The question of marriage lies at the center of Jane Austen’s novels. The issues bound up in the pursuit of love, happiness, money, and status were those of her day and informed the plots and morals of her work. In this fascinating book, Hazel Jones explores the ways in which these themes manifest themselves in Jane Austen’s life and fiction, against the backdrop of contemporary conduct manuals, letters, diaries, journals and newspapers. Drawing on original research, this entertaining and detailed study provides a charming and profound insight into the world of Jane Austen. 

 

Table Of Contents:

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction

1: The Advantage of Choice

2: The Power of Refusal

3: An Acquaintance Formed in a Public Place

4: White Satin and Lace Veils

5: Where N Takes M, For Better, For Worse

6: Wedding Journeys

7: Scandal and Gossip

8: A Contract of Mutual Agreeableness

9: Domestic Happiness Overthrown

10: The Simple Regimen of Separate Rooms

11:The Years of Danger

12:  An Old Maid at Last

 

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Review at Continuum Books:

Hazel Jones has written a masterful accounting of the crucial role played by marriage in Jane Austen’s novels and the world she and her characters lived in. Brilliantly researched and documented  — including information taken from the fascinating and sometimes troubling “conduct manuals” on the proper interaction between the sexes — Jane Austen and Marriage offers deep insights that inform not only one’s reading of Austen’s novels but of the treacherous social bedrock underlying the lives of women living in that time. And in so doing, Hazel Jones has presented the reader with another testament to the long, hard march of women throughout history. It is a book that reflects Jane Austen’s own penetrating gaze and insight into Regency society and no doubt will find a place in the library of even the most sophisticated “Janeite”.’  

[Alice Steinbach, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman.]

About the Author:

         

Hazel Jones taught English at Exeter University, specializing in Jane Austen. She tutored courses on the novelist for the thriving Summer Academy Programme, which attracted students from all over the world. She continues to organize Jane Austen residential courses for adults at various venues in the UK, focusing on her novels and her life and times.

 

Pre-order at Continuum Books [$29.95] or Amazon.com [$19.77]