Virtual Region: Jane Austen's Genius (VIRTUAL)

Jane Austen's Genius

Join the Virtual Region for a presentation by Christine Kenyon Jones on "Austen's Genius in the Context of Early 19th Century Publishing and Literary Relations."

Jane Austen and Lord Byron are often presented as opposites. In Regency England, he was a celebrity author while she was a parson’s daughter writing anonymously. But here they are together at last. This Zoom talk explores how their lives, interests, work, and sense of humor often brought them within touching distance, and sets them side by side in the Regency and Romantic period.

Kenyon Jones is a research fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London, where she taught a course on Austen for many years. Her books include Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (2001) and (with Geoffrey Bond) Dangerous to Show: Byron and his Portraits (2020), winner of the 2021 Elma Dangerfield Prize. Her essay on Austen, Dido Belle, and the Mansfield family, “Ambiguous Cousinship,” was published in Persuasions On-Line in 2010, and her detailed study of Austen and Byron as fellow authors in the John Murray publishing house appeared in Persuasions in 2014. Her book Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations was published by Bloomsbury in February 2024.

Registration is free. Virtual Region members will automatically receive a meeting notice. Non-members of the region can request to attend by sending an email titled Free Registration to jasnavirtualregion@gmail.com.