Celebrating the Bicentenary

Welcome back to Chawton House Library Conversations: August Podcast. First launched on Sunday 8 March 2015 while celebrating International Women’s Day, our monthly podcast is a round up of news, events and highlights, helping you stay connected with Chawton House Library wherever you are.

This month we reflect on the various events commemorating the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, both here and elsewhere. Winchester Cathedral, Austen’s final resting place, held a special event to unveil the new £10 note, on which she features. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and our own Executive Director Gillian Dow spoke at the event. Listen to hear Gillian’s insight on the launch, and her warm reflections on how so many people chose to celebrate Austen’s ‘peak celebrity’.

We also learn more about #TheDarcyLook and how this can help to save ‘Jane’s Great House’. Director of Fundraising, Jane Lillystone, tells us more about it, as well as the new website specifically created to raise funds. Click here to see the new website and find out more.

Chawton House Library hosted a concert that drew from seventeen music albums belonging to Jane Austen and her female relations. Listen to hear a few bars from the evening performance. Professor David Owen Norris from the University of Southampton organized the event. He discusses the successful evening with us, as well as the joys of performing in Chawton.

We speak to the JASNA International Visitor Misty Krueger, Assistant Professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, who has spent six weeks in the village of Chawton. Her research is on Jane Austen, juvenilia, and women’s writings addressed to young women. She marvels at the breadth of the collection here and the immersive culture of this space. As part of her grant application, she volunteered both here and at the Jane Austen House Museum. Click here to read her blog and find out what she has gotten up to in more detail.

Our first Visiting Fellow for July is Ros Powell, lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, who is looking at the dialogues which connect new scientific ideas with a popular audience in the eighteenth century.

Our second Visiting Fellow is Robin Runia, Associate Professor of English at Xavier University in Louisiana, New Orleans. She is working on the uncanny similarities between Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Maria Edgeworth’s Maneuvering.

Finally we speak to Jodi Wyett, Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is doing research on Francis Burney and her predilection of tolerance towards Catholicism.

Next month we look to our upcoming Autumn events, as well as hearing the latest update on our fundraising campaign to ‘Save Jane’s Great House’.