Recent Event Highlights

Jan Fahey and Terry Ryan explored the history of bathing, housekeeping and home remedies during the Regency era in “Spring Cleaning at Chawton”  at our Spring 2018 meeting.

Robert Rodi discussed his motivation and efforts to create his Bitch in a Bonnet blog and books, as well as his full-length comedy of manners based on Austen’s short story Edgar and Emma, at the Fall 2016 meeting.

Frequent JASNA AGM speaker and founder of Juvenilia Press Juliet McMaster spoke and signed books at the Spring 2016 meeting.

We hold our events at a variety of locations throughout our widespread region, and feature meals ranging from afternoon teas to sit-down or boxed lunches.

Following are just a few highlights of recent JASNA Southwest meetings. For detailed recaps, photos, audio and video, check out our event archive.

• Andrew Davies, screenwriter of the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries with Colin Firth, Sense and Sensibility (2008), Northanger Abbey (2007), Emma (1996), War and Peace (2016), the original House of Cards and numerous acclaimed adaptations of such authors as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot—and the completion of Austen’s Sanditon, an eight-part miniseries airing in 2020
• “Jane Austen in Hollywood,” including a day at Sony Pictures Studio with Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (editors of Jane Austen in Hollywood) on “The Unfilmable Jane Austen: The Case of Northanger Abbey,” “The Modern Elizabeth Bennet: A Conversation with Ashley Clements, star of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) and “Pride and Prejudice and Pelisses: Costuming Jane Austen,” with fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
• Austen scholars Janine Barchas and Devoney Looser sharing “What’s Next in Jane Austen?”—a day including the official launch of their 2020 issue of the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language with the same theme, as well as discussions of their latest works, The Lost Books of Jane Austen (Barchas) and The Daily Jane Austen (Looser), plus a Regency photo booth, JASNA Southwest’s 40th anniversary celebration and a trivia contest
• “It’s All Relative: Relationships in Austen,” with attendees having the opportunity to explore on their own or take docent-led tours at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens after hearing presentations from mother-son duo Deborah Knuth Klenck (an Austen scholar) and Ted Scheinman (author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan) as well as UCLA Emeritus Professor Charles Lynn Batten, who discussed marital relationships in Austen’s novels
• “Jane Austen Meets Mary Shelley,” with talks by John Kessel (author of Pride and Prometheus, a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein), UCLA Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor Anne Mellor (who spoke on the topic of “Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering”) and Victoria Shorr (author of Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning)
• “200 Years of Persuasion,” with author Collins Hemingway’s presentation on “Persuasion and the Art and Science of Austen’s Fiction” and Austen scholar Lynda Hall and author Erika Kotite on “A Room of Anne’s Own: Homelessness and Female Spaces in Persuasion“
• “Spring Cleaning at Chawton,” a down-and-dirty look at the history of bathing, housekeeping and home remedies during the Regency era, with JASNA Southwest board members Jan Fahey and Terry Ryan
• WWJD: Who Would Jane Date?, humorous insights on how Austen would approach online dating
• “From Hampshire to Hollywood,” featuring the use of Austen’s novels and their film adaptations to teach college students
• What Jane Saw creator Janine Barchas’ talk on Will and Jane, following the exhibition “Will and Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” which she co-curated for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
• A sneak preview of Pride and Prejudice the Musical
• Kate Rorrick and Jay Bushman, the creative team behind Pemberley Digital and the Emmy Award-winning web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
• Robert Rodi, author of Edgar and Emma (which takes the three-page story Austen wrote in her teens and expands it into a full-length comedy of manners) and the Bitch in a Bonnet blog and books on Austen’s novels
• Juvenilia Press founder and renowned 19th century English literary scholar Juliet McMaster on the Austen family’s Naval service and the female experience at sea
• The cast and creative team behind the digital series Emma Approved
• A two-day super-regional conference on “Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen’s Problem Child?” that included visiting the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, and with a talk by Virginia Tech Professor Peter Graham, author of Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists, about how nature and nurture interact in the character development of sibling groups in Sense and Sensibility
• A performance by Jane Austen Unscripted
• “In the Garden with Fanny Price,” including a keynote address by Kim Wilson, author of In the Garden with Jane Austen, UCLA Professor Anne Mellor on “Fanny Price and Slavery” and a docent-led tour of the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden
• “Pride and Prejudice: Characters We Love to Hate,” including a presentation by Sue Forgue, creator of The Regency Encyclopedia, that used contemporaneous prints and panels from the 1813 Horwood’s Map of London to locate Wickham and Lydia’s London hiding place
• UCLA Professor Michael Suk-Young Chwe on his book Jane Austen, Game Theorist