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Welcome back to our 2024 series, Austen & the Brontës!

We invite you to enjoy the second half of the series with us!
Register below to join us for free online events, complete with live presentations and audience Q&A!

  • Illustrating Jane Eyre…with a little bit on Jane Austen | Deborah Barnum
    Illustrating Jane Eyre…with a little bit on Jane Austen | Deborah Barnum
    Tue, Nov 19
    Online
    Nov 19, 2024, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EST
    Online
    Nov 19, 2024, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EST
    Online
  • What They Talk About When They Talk About Self: Conceptions of Personhood in Austen and Brontë | Maria Frawley
    What They Talk About When They Talk About Self: Conceptions of Personhood in Austen and Brontë | Maria Frawley
    Dec 03, 2024, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EST
    Online
“I have lost a treasure, such a sister”: Sisters, Sickness, Letters and Grief
01:29:10
Jane Austen Summer Program

“I have lost a treasure, such a sister”: Sisters, Sickness, Letters and Grief

“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister [sic], such a friend as never can have been surpassed, - She was the sun of my life.”, wrote Cassandra Austen on July 18, 1817, following her sister Jane’s death. As well as expressing the intensive pain of familial loss and the void left by Jane’s passing, Cassandra’s letter also captures the fullness of the sisterly bond between her and Jane. As is well known, Charlotte Brontë was no fan of Jane Austen’s published writing, but her own private letters echo the sentiments expressed in Cassandra’s letter. Like Cassandra, Charlotte experienced the same emotional pain arising from having to watch family members deteriorate and die. She lost her brother Branwell in September 1848, her sister Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) in December of the same year, and youngest sister Anne (author of Agnes Grey) in May 1849. Using the Austen family letters as a source of inspiration, this paper draws on Charlotte’s surviving letters and her neglected poetry to explore how she articulated her own painful experience of successive sibling loss – especially Emily and Anne’s deaths – in the period 1848-1849, arguing that it is through the written word that Charlotte found the most solace in the face of personal devastation. Dr Claire O’Callaghan is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Loughborough. Claire’s research focuses on the Brontës and she has published widely on their lives and works, including the short public history book Emily Brontë Reappraised (2018), published for Emily’s bicentenary. Claire’s recent research focuses on the Brontës’ letters and health. She is also working with the Brontë Parsonage Museum on the transcription and publication of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Parisian Little Book’, a missing piece in her known juvenilia. Claire is Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official academic journal of the Brontë Society. Email: C.OCallaghan@lboro.ac.uk Social media handle: @drclaireocall (on X, Threads, Instagram and TikTok).
Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma
01:28:52
Jane Austen Summer Program

Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma

"Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma" explores how Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë grappled with the paradoxes of universal kinship in an age of empire. It uncovers the troubled history of missionary intermarriage in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it shows how this brief period of controversy ripples through the treatments of family, marriage, and moral corruption in Mansfield Park, Sanditon, and Jane Eyre. Examining their representations of endogamy, interracial union, and Christian universalism within the context of missionary debates, I suggest that the "domestic" fictions of Austen and Brontë prove to be profound meditations on religion, imperialism, and the anxious policing of kinship in the global context. Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English and the Jane E. Ruby Chair for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2020) and, with Joshua King (Baylor U), the co-editor of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019). Her essays appear or are forthcoming in journals including Comparative Literature, MLQ, Romantic Circles Praxis, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Dickens Studies Annual. With Sebastian Lecourt (U of Houston), she is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on "Religion, Empire, and the State of the Field" in Victorian Literature. Werner's current research examines the role of foreign missionary presses in the development of the nineteenth-century idea of "world literature."
You are Passionate, Jane | Diana Birchall and Syrie James
01:26:57
Jane Austen Summer Program

You are Passionate, Jane | Diana Birchall and Syrie James

Diana Birchall worked for many years as a story analyst for Warner Bros Studios, evaluating novels. Reading popular manuscripts went side by side with a lifetime of Jane Austen scholarship, and resulted in her writing Austenesque fiction both as homage and close study of Jane Austen’s style. She is the author of Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, In Defense of Mrs. Elton, Mrs. Elton in America, The Bride of Northanger, and hundreds of short stories. She and Syrie James have co-written several Austenesque comedy plays, which have been performed in many cities. Diana's own "You Are Passionate, Jane," a dialogue between Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte in Heaven, has been performed for many appreciative JASNA audiences as well as at Chawton House Library in England. Find out more about Diana on her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/diana.birchall. Syrie James is the international bestselling author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels of historical and contemporary fiction, including The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen, Jane Austen's First Love, and The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. A life member of the WGA, JASNA, and the Historical Novel Society, Syrie has sold 20 screenplays to film and television and written, directed, and performed in original plays across North America and off-Broadway in New York. Syrie has spoken at numerous JASNA events and at Chawton House Library in England. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and won many awards including the Audiobook Audie. Syrie is currently writing a new series of Historical Mystery Romances set in 19th Century England that will be published in 2025. Learn more about Syrie on her website: www.syriejames.com.

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