Welcome back to our 2024 series, Austen & the Brontës!

We invite you to enjoy the second half of the series with us!
Register below to join us for free online events, complete with live presentations and audience Q&A!

This paper takes as its point of departure the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet, in crisis mode after having just learned of her sister Lydia’s elopement, thinks first of what she believes she has forever lost in Mr. Darcy. The narrator interrupts Elizabeth’s train of thought to interject that “self, though it would intrude, could not engross her,” and the narrative pivots to Elizabeth’s desire to return home and help her family. The sentence is striking in part because Jane Austen uses the term “self” in this stand-alone fashion so rarely. Instead, she draws on phrases such as self-reproach, self-importance, and self-deception that draw her reader’s attention to the subjective experience of her characters. Charlotte Brontë, too, peppers her fiction with terms anchored in the self, but her cache suggests subtle differences of interest than one finds in Austen’s works. In Jane Eyre, for example, Brontë flags self-righteousness, self-doubt, and self-esteem. Via a series of close readings across novels written by both authors, I will uncover the differing understanding of the self that underpins their conception of the individual and why these difference signal more than, say, disparate approaches to narrative technique. Maria Frawley is a Professor of English at the George Washington University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century women writers, including two recent essays on life-writing in relation to the fiction of both Anne Brontë and Charlotte Brontë. Additionally she is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Jane Austen. She is currently at work on a book for Bloomsbury Publishing on keywords of Jane Austen’s fiction.

Here’s the link to Deb’s list of illustrators! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DS8l3uQGeyS52whoZ-WuGOLrgqYXnLoK/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105079119940298952148&rtpof=true&sd=true Charlotte Brontë never saw her Jane Eyre illustrated, unlike many of her contemporaries who published serially with accompanying illustrations. It is such a visual book and the number and variety of artistic renderings through the years is quite daunting. This talk will be a visual journey through several of the illustrated editions of Jane Eyre that began in 1872, 15 years after its original publication and the different ways the artists portray particular scenes or characters in the novel, and why some might work better than others. I will also compare the work of the very few illustrators who took on Jane Austen as well. Deborah Barnum, a former law librarian, is the owner of Bygone Books, an online shop of collectible books. She co-founded the JASNA-Vermont Region and is currently the Advisory Chair for the South Carolina Region. She authors the “Jane Austen in Vermont” blog, is on the board of the North American Friends of Chawton House, works with Peter Sabor on his “Reading with Austen” project, compiled the “Jane Austen Bibliography” from 2007-2019 for JASNA’s Persuasions-Online and the Burney “Year in Studies” for the Burney Journal from 2010 to the present. Deb has given talks on collecting and illustrating Jane Austen at several JASNA AGMs, regional meetings, and the OLLI program at USCB, as well as talks on Jane Austen’s London and travel in Sense and Sensibility.

“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister [sic], such a friend as never can have been surpassed, - She was the sun of my life.”, wrote Cassandra Austen on July 18, 1817, following her sister Jane’s death. As well as expressing the intensive pain of familial loss and the void left by Jane’s passing, Cassandra’s letter also captures the fullness of the sisterly bond between her and Jane. As is well known, Charlotte Brontë was no fan of Jane Austen’s published writing, but her own private letters echo the sentiments expressed in Cassandra’s letter. Like Cassandra, Charlotte experienced the same emotional pain arising from having to watch family members deteriorate and die. She lost her brother Branwell in September 1848, her sister Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) in December of the same year, and youngest sister Anne (author of Agnes Grey) in May 1849. Using the Austen family letters as a source of inspiration, this paper draws on Charlotte’s surviving letters and her neglected poetry to explore how she articulated her own painful experience of successive sibling loss – especially Emily and Anne’s deaths – in the period 1848-1849, arguing that it is through the written word that Charlotte found the most solace in the face of personal devastation. Dr Claire O’Callaghan is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Loughborough. Claire’s research focuses on the Brontës and she has published widely on their lives and works, including the short public history book Emily Brontë Reappraised (2018), published for Emily’s bicentenary. Claire’s recent research focuses on the Brontës’ letters and health. She is also working with the Brontë Parsonage Museum on the transcription and publication of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Parisian Little Book’, a missing piece in her known juvenilia. Claire is Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official academic journal of the Brontë Society. Email: C.OCallaghan@lboro.ac.uk Social media handle: @drclaireocall (on X, Threads, Instagram and TikTok).

"Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma" explores how Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë grappled with the paradoxes of universal kinship in an age of empire. It uncovers the troubled history of missionary intermarriage in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it shows how this brief period of controversy ripples through the treatments of family, marriage, and moral corruption in Mansfield Park, Sanditon, and Jane Eyre. Examining their representations of endogamy, interracial union, and Christian universalism within the context of missionary debates, I suggest that the "domestic" fictions of Austen and Brontë prove to be profound meditations on religion, imperialism, and the anxious policing of kinship in the global context. Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English and the Jane E. Ruby Chair for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2020) and, with Joshua King (Baylor U), the co-editor of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019). Her essays appear or are forthcoming in journals including Comparative Literature, MLQ, Romantic Circles Praxis, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Dickens Studies Annual. With Sebastian Lecourt (U of Houston), she is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on "Religion, Empire, and the State of the Field" in Victorian Literature. Werner's current research examines the role of foreign missionary presses in the development of the nineteenth-century idea of "world literature."

Lizzie Dunford and Ann Dinsdale, principal curators for the Jane Austen House and the Brontë Parsonage respectively, will join Jane Austen & Co. for an interactive discussion centered on the historic homes of these celebrated women writers.

Laura Rocklyn is an actress, writer, and first person historical interpreter. She has performed with regional theater companies across the country, and she writes and performs historic character portrayals for educational groups, including portrayals of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Laura is a produced playwright, whose credits include an original adaptation of Jane Eyre that she co-authored with Sally Boyett being performed at the Classic Theatre of Maryland, and Laura’s one-woman play Charlotte Brontë: To Do More & Better Things being presented as part of the North American Friends of Chawton House 2021 Speaker Subscription Series. Laura has published articles in “Brontë Studies” and “The Revere Express,” and she was the winner of the “LitMag” 2021 Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction. Laura holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and an MFA from The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at The George Washington University.

Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (2021), shortlisted for the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize, Honorable Mention for the NAVSA prize for the Best Book in Victorian Studies; Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (2016), which won the NAVSA prize for the best book of the year; Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001). Her co-edited volumes include The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (2020), with Dennis Denisoff; a special issue of Victorian Review, “Extending Families,” with Kelly Hager (2013); and Women and British Aestheticism with Kathy A. Psomiades (1999). She has also edited Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006) and Lucas Malet's 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003). Schaffer has published more than 50 articles on topics including Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, ethical readings, women writers, material culture, popular fiction, and aestheticism.

Lesley Peterson was until her retirement Professor of English at the University of North Alabama, where she taught Shakespeare and Jane Austen. She has also developed and taught creative writing programs for young people and for seniors. Currently she is Editor of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies. She presents regularly at JASNA AGMs, is one of this year's JASNA travelling lecturers, has published on Jane Austen in Persuasions and elsewhere, and recently co-edited Austen’s “Sir Charles Grandison” for the Juvenilia Press. She is writing a book on Jane Austen as dramatist.

Diana Birchall worked for many years as a story analyst for Warner Bros Studios, evaluating novels. Reading popular manuscripts went side by side with a lifetime of Jane Austen scholarship, and resulted in her writing Austenesque fiction both as homage and close study of Jane Austen’s style. She is the author of Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, In Defense of Mrs. Elton, Mrs. Elton in America, The Bride of Northanger, and hundreds of short stories. She and Syrie James have co-written several Austenesque comedy plays, which have been performed in many cities. Diana's own "You Are Passionate, Jane," a dialogue between Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte in Heaven, has been performed for many appreciative JASNA audiences as well as at Chawton House Library in England. Find out more about Diana on her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/diana.birchall. Syrie James is the international bestselling author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels of historical and contemporary fiction, including The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen, Jane Austen's First Love, and The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. A life member of the WGA, JASNA, and the Historical Novel Society, Syrie has sold 20 screenplays to film and television and written, directed, and performed in original plays across North America and off-Broadway in New York. Syrie has spoken at numerous JASNA events and at Chawton House Library in England. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and won many awards including the Audiobook Audie. Syrie is currently writing a new series of Historical Mystery Romances set in 19th Century England that will be published in 2025. Learn more about Syrie on her website: www.syriejames.com.