Theme
For much of her life, Jane Austen lived quietly in rural country villages in southern England, but she was not disconnected from the world. She read widely, followed politics, attended plays in London, and played and transcribed new musical pieces. She grew up in a house that doubled as a school preparing boys for university, with a father writing sermons and managing a farm. She had brothers in the Navy, at university, at least one that took the Grand Tour of continental Europe, and one in banking. She knew strong and accomplished women, and she was almost certainly exposed to new ideas about the role of women in society. She knew about war, enslavement, and revolutions that toppled monarchies. She benefited from discoveries in science and changes in commerce and industry.
At this AGM, we will focus on Austen’s world and how it influenced both her published works and her writing that was not intended for publication. In her novels, Austen engages with the changing ideas and current events of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but some of her meaning may be lost to 21st-century readers. In-jokes and references to current events and public figures would have been obvious to those of her contemporaries who were not “dull elves,” but modern readers rely on annotations and the work of cultural historians to plumb the depth of Austen’s genius.
We will gather in Cleveland to explore Jane Austen’s origin story: where she came from, the world of ideas in which her genius was steeped, and the revolutionary world that inspired her to lead her own literary revolution. We will come to a deeper appreciation of her work by understanding what she read, heard, and observed, the opinions she formed, and the ways in which she distilled knowledge and experience into her chosen art form, the novel.
