Happy Austenmas!

First, a very happy "Austenmas" (as Lisa Brown calls Jane Austen's birthday, December 16) to you all! And a very happy birthday to Our Authoress, who at age 238 is riding higher than ever in our and the world's esteem. (Above, a photo of a quilt Jane Austen and other family members made.)

Second, here's the link to the national JASNA organization's Austenmas gift to the world: Volume 34.1 of Persuasions On-Line, JASNA's electronic journal.  This link always goes “live” at midnight on Dec. 16. The issue includes papers on Pride and Prejudice from JASNA's 2013 Annual General Meeting in Minneapolis, as well as a very lively "Miscellany" section (which even includes a paper on the YouTube sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries)!

Third, here's a supplement to a recent communication: In addition to the two English Country Dance events already held in our Region this month, the Syracuse Country Dancers will be hosting an English Country Dance at the United Church of Fayetteville (310 E. Genesee St., Fayetteville) on Saturday, Dec. 21, 8-11 pm. Carmen Giunta will be calling. Music by Baa and the Shepherds: Barbara Seppeler, piano, Lee and Julian Shepherd, violin and cello, with a guest appearance by Ruth Thomson, Celtic harp. Thanks to Lee Shepherd for the information. (Note, by the way, that information about events hosted by ECD groups in three Upstate cities--Syracuse, Rochester, and Binghamton--can always be obtained by clicking on the appropriate links in the “Links” column on the right side of this blog.)

Finally, JASNA Syracuse’s first meeting of 2014 will be the Candlemas meeting, held in the Sargent Room of the Liverpool Public Library (310 Tulip St., Liverpool) on Saturday, Feb. 1, at 2 pm. Taking our lead from the old Monty Python sketch called “The Argument Clinic,” we’re going to hold an “Argument Clinic” on Mansfield Park, JA’s most controversial novel (which is celebrating its bicentennial in 2014). Love Fanny Price or hate her? Want to take Mary Crawford out to dinner or hang her out to dry?  We’ll shake off the midwinter blahs even further by having a book swap. Details about the swap, and about subsequent 2014 meetings, will be given in the new year.

Holiday Gatherings for JASNA Syracuse and JASNA Rochester

“Action Jane” is making her holiday preparations, and so are the Syracuse and Rochester Regions of JASNA! On consecutive Saturdays--December 7 and 14--each region will be hearing a presentation by a distinguished local JASNA member, and celebrating the Winter Solstice holidays and Jane Austen’s 238th birthday (on December 16).

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First, on Saturday, December 7, at 2:00 pm, the JASNA Syracuse Region and the Jane Austen Book Club-CNY will join forces on the third floor of the Colgate Bookstore (3 Utica St., Hamilton) to hear Deborah Knuth Klenck’s presentation “Performing to Strangers: Being, Seeming, and Courting in Pride and Prejudice.” Deborah is Professor of English at Colgate University and has taught there since 1978, providing an array of courses from Shakespeare to Restoration and Eighteenth Century to Survey of British Fiction and seminars on Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and other authors. She has also taught in the Women's Studies Program and the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum, and has directed the honors program in English. And she has published numerous papers in JASNA’s Persuasions and other journals, and has given presentations at JASNA’s Annual General Meeting, the Modern Language Association Convention, and other scholarly gatherings. Her December 7 presentation, in fact, will be the breakout session she was unable to give at this year’s JASNA AGM in Minneapolis because of injury--so she and we are eagerly looking forward to this!

For refreshments at the December 7 gathering, as reported earlier, we’re planning a cookie potluck: Each attendee is asked to bring a dozen or so cookies to share. If you haven’t got time to bake cookies personally, that’s OK--we’re not expecting either Lady Catherine de Bourgh or Martha Stewart to barge in and provide a critique. But if you come to “have your share of the conversation,” do bring a share of the cookies! Tea and lemonade will be provided for an early birthday toast to Jane Austen.

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The following Saturday, December 14, at 11:00 am, the JASNA Rochester Region will host its annual Jane Austen Birthday Lunch at the Chatterbox Club, 25 N. Goodman St., Rochester. The program will be a presentation by Nicola Minott-Ahl titled “Game Theorist or Gamester--Is Lydia Bennet the Real Heroine of Pride and Prejudice?” Nicola resides at the western end of the Syracuse Region but works in the Rochester Region: She is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and is on the Steering Committee of the Media and Society Program, at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva. She teaches and writes on Nineteenth Century British Literature, and her interests include the Gothic, historical fiction, architecture and novels, and film adaptation of Nineteenth Century novels. She has published articles on William Thackeray, on the architectural novel in France and England, and in the fields of Film and Adaptation Studies; she also has a book forthcoming from Sussex Academic Press.

The birthday festivities will include lunch (featuring the Chatterbox Club’s traditional popovers), dessert, and the beloved toast to Jane Austen from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Janeites.” The cost for the program is $27 per person, and advance registration is required. More information and a registration form are available on the JASNA Rochester blog, at this link.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Now that the World Series is over, are you or your partner missing baseball already? Do you still believe baseball was invented just down the road in Cooperstown? Did you ever wonder how a cricket match can take five days to complete? Even a casual baseball or sports fan is sure to love our co-coordinator Lisa Brown's presentation of "Did Jane Austen Invent Baseball: The Early History of Bat and Ball Games in the U.S. and England." Lisa will talk about the origins of baseball, cricket and what Jane's got to do with it on Saturday, November 16th at 1:00 pm in the Barnes & Noble in Pittsford, a suburb of Rochester.

Upcoming JASNA Syracuse Meetings

Here’s a reminder of our All Hallows meeting on Nov. 2, and an announcement of plans for our Christmas/JA’s birthday meeting on Dec. 7. The time for both meetings will be 2 pm.

On Saturday, November 2, at RiverRead Books (5 Court St., Binghamton), we’ll discuss “Slavery and Servitude in Mansfield Park.” Until the Patricia Rozema film version of MP appeared in 1999, few readers paid much attention to the references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation in Antigua--but the Rozema film, though it exaggerated these, at least made many of us notice them. How does the fact that Sir Thomas’s fortunes are partly founded on slavery affect our views of him, of Fanny Price’s situation, and of Mansfield Park in general? We’ll start our observance of MP’s bicentennial in 2014 by considering these issues--as well as how the Rozema film relates to the novel generally.

On Saturday, December 7, we’ll gather for a joint meeting with the Jane Austen Book Club-CNY of Hamilton. Please note a change of venue for this meeting since our August 18 blog post: We’ll assemble on the third floor of the Colgate Bookstore (3 Utica St., Hamilton) to hear Deborah Knuth Klenck, JASNA Syracuse member and Professor of English at Colgate University, present a talk titled “Performing to Strangers: Being, Seeming, and Courting in Pride and Prejudice.” Deborah was unfortunately unable to give this talk at the 2013 JASNA Annual General Meeting in Minneapolis, so both she and we are eagerly looking forward to it in Hamilton!

And for refreshments at the Dec. 7 meeting, we’re going to Plan C--for Cookies! We propose a cookie potluck: Each attendee is asked to bring a dozen or so cookies to share. If you haven’t got time to bake, that’s OK--we’re not expecting Martha Stewart to come. But if you come to “have your share of the conversation,” do bring a share of the cookies! Tea and lemonade will be provided.

The 2013 AGM: Pleasant Moments and Memorable People

Here's a photo essay from this year's JASNA Annual General Meeting in Minneapolis, "Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice...Timeless."(All photos are by your Regional Coordinator, A. Marie Sprayberry. Remember that you can click on any photo to enlarge it.)

In Minneapolis, fictional home to The Mary Tyler Moore Show...

...we celebrated the 200th anniversary of another spunky heroine, Elizabeth Bennet! Nicely illustrating the mingling of the Regency era with the 21st century, here's NY Metro Co-Regional Coordinator (and my roommate) Meg Levin against the Minneapolis skyline.

The "Meryton Market" Emporium was of course a beehive of activity throughout the AGM. Here, the hard-working staff of Jane Austen Books rings up an early transaction. 

An outstanding feature of this AGM was the "Regency Room," containing an exhibition of costumes from the Guthrie Theater's recent production of P&P plus a dazzling array of items from author and Minnesota Region member Candice Hern's collection of Regency-era magazines, fashion prints, and other artifacts. Below, a few of Hern's reticules, purses, and other "beautiful ornaments" that would have made Lydia Bennet "quite wild"!

Two of the Guthrie's costumes, along with a display of items from Hern's collection relating to the 1817 death and funeral of the Prince Regent's only daughter, Princess Charlotte. (For more information about Charlotte, go here for your RC's Persuasions On-Line paper about the Prince Regent, "Sex, Power, and Other People's Money.")

The author signing on Friday evening was another highlight. Plenary speaker John Mullan could hardly keep up with the demand for his book What Matters in Jane Austen?.

 
Good friends at the authors' tables included Susan Allen Ford, editor of Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line, who wrote the introduction to Chawton House Library's republication of Dr. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women...

...and Kathleen Anderson (left) and Susan Jones, Co-RCs for the South Florida Region and authors of Jane Austen's Guide to Thrift.

The banquet and ball on Saturday night included a number of celebrities! While your RC had a chat with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II...

...we were also honored with the presence of "Dr. and Mrs. James Fordyce"...

...and the Regency-era traveler "Lady Hester Stanhope" (who had obviously just returned from the Middle East)!

Two Janeites who would be celebrities at any AGM: Former Syracuse Region member and present NY Capital Region member Diane Levine greets the one and only Baronda Bradley of North Texas. Baronda's ball costume--a show-stopper as usual--harks back to 1775, the year of Jane Austen's birth.

The AGM closed with a panel presentation at Sunday brunch highlighting another meeting between the Regency era and the 21st century: the YouTube sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Your RC was unfortunately too far from the dais to get a good photo of the panelists, Bernie Su, Kate Rorick, and Jenni Powell, but here's a slide from the presentation.

A JASNA Syracuse "Mantua-Maker"

Your Regional Coordinator writes:

The 2013 JASNA Annual General Meeting in Minneapolis, “Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice...Timeless,” is now only a few days away--and I decided this year that I would commission a new gown for the occasion. “Old Gold” (the Indian-made frock that I purchased many years ago at the Erie Boulevard Salvation Army in Syracuse, because of its vague resemblance to a Regency ball gown) is finally ready for retirement.

But where, you might ask, would I find a "mantua-maker" (the Regency term for a dressmaker) for a bespoke ball gown in the Syracuse Region? The JASNA New York Metropolitan Region, of course, has its own talented mantua-maker: Maureen O'Connor, whose work has recently received much-deserved praise in Deborah Yaffe's book Among the Janeites. But is such another seamstress to be found here in the wilds of Upstate?

The answer is yes! JASNA Syracuse member Sandra Stevens draws inspiration from fashion plates of the period, chooses exquisite materials, does meticulous work, and consults her clients’ preferences throughout the process of creating a gown. And Sandra does millinery as well. Here, her daughter Mimi wears a complete Stevens ensemble at the fashion show conducted by Lisa Brown at the Colgate Bookstore in March 2012.

Below, your RC and her mantua-maker proudly show off the new gown. Although I’m memorizing a few of Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s lines in readiness for the banquet and ball in Minneapolis--since I suppose Lady Catherine is the Pride and Prejudice character I most resemble in this costume--I am certainly the opposite of “most seriously displeased.” In fact, I’m “most seriously pleased”!

Sandra can be contacted at sndrstvns at gmail.com.

Reminder: JASNA Syracuse Michaelmas Meeting at Liverpool, Sat., Sept. 14

On Saturday, September 14, at 2 pm,  in the Sargent Room of the Liverpool Public Library (310 Tulip St., Liverpool), our Michaelmas meeting topic will be “Jane Austen and the 10-Pound Note.”

The Bank of England has recently announced its plan to feature Jane Austen on its 10-pound note as of the year 2017--so, using this as our inspiration, let’s talk about money in the novels and in JA’s own life. What were different characters’ incomes or dowries? What kinds of lives were they able to afford on these sums, and how did their money (or the lack of it) affect the decisions they made? What did different consumer goods and services cost? How did JA’s limited income during her lifetime affect her perceptions and her writing? All these topics and more are fair game!

The following two articles (published in JASNA’s journals and available online) provide helpful background information for this discussion. They certainly aren’t “required reading” for attending the meeting, but they are both instructive and enjoyable. Handouts based on these articles will be provided at the meeting.

James Heldman, “How Wealthy Was Mr. Darcy--Really?”

Marilyn Francus, “Jane Austen, Pound for Pound.”

And before we start the discussion, two door prizes will be awarded for the first correct answers to two (fairly easy) questions about incomes. So come and "have your share of the conversation"--as well as a chance at one of the prizes!

P.S. Some members have expressed interest in whether the new film Austenland will be showing in the Syracuse area. At the moment, your RCs know of only two Upstate openings for the film: on Friday, September 13, at Pittsford Cinema 9 on Rt. 31 in Pittsford (near the Barnes and Noble where JASNA Rochester meets); and on Friday, September 20, at Cinemapolis on 120 E. Green St. in Ithaca. If we have any more information by meeting time, we'll certainly pass it along.