Southwest Region: Jane Austen Afterlives

The Impact of Austen Upon Culture and Communities

Join JASNA Southwest for an in-person meeting with two dynamic scholars.

Leigh-Michil George will discuss "Searching for Miss Lambe: Austen's Afterlives, the Woman of Color, and Regency Noir." This talk focuses on the PBS adaptation of Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon and the character of Miss Lambe, a wealthy woman of color. The television series expands Austen's brief description of the "sickly" and "chilly" Miss Lambe into the vivacious and outspoken Georgiana Lambe, a Black heiress from Antigua. The presentation explores the resonances between Georgiana Lambe and the Jamaican heiress Olivia Fairfield, the heroine of The Woman of Colour, an anonymous novel published in 1808. Additionally, it delves into the connections between Sanditon and recent romantic narratives set in the Regency period that foreground Black women's lives and loves, such as Shondaland's Bridgerton and Vanessa Riley's Island Queen.

Lillian Lu will give the presentation "The Bennets Are Asian American: Asian Diaspora and the Regency Period." Asian diaspora actors are becoming a growing media presence, having been recently featured in film adaptations of Austen and other Regency-inspired media, such as Fire Island (2022), Persuasion (2022), and The Courtship (2022). How do we read these two phenomena together: the Regency Era and Asian Americanness? How might we couple together an Asian American studies framework and an Austen studies framework to better understand the effects of casting Asians in Regency Period pieces beyond the basic terms of color-blind casting, representation writ-large, and assimilation?

Registration Details

Member Registration Fee: $30
Guests/Nonmembers: $35
Students: $15

Breakfast will be included. 

The deadline for registration is January 31. Please register online.