If you really love Jane Austen, consider joining JASNA (The Jane Austen Society of North America). We welcome all who enjoy Jane Austen's works. The JASNA Massachusetts Region includes all JASNA members who are residents of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. We have many Austen scholars among our membership as well as those who simply enjoy reading Austen and sharing their pleasure with others.

We hold five events during our membership year: four regular meetings (September, November, March and May), plus a celebration of Jane Austen's birthday in December. These events usually consist of a talk or lecture lasting about an hour, followed by discussion and light refreshments. We'd be very pleased to have you join us at our next meeting.

2024 - 2025 Season Meetings this season will be held at 2pm, at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, MA. Meetings will be a hybrid of in-person and Zoom. Meeting fee is $10 JASNA members, $15 non-members. Cash is accepted at the meeting. Click here to purchase tickets. Click here for driving directions and parking information. Sunday, March 16, 2025 2 pm, Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation Juliette Wells A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World's Greatest Novelist Juliette Wells is Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College. She is the author of three histories of Austen's readers and fans, all published by Bloomsbury Academic: A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World's Greatest Novelist (2023), Reading Austen in America (2017), and Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011). For Penguin Classics, she created reader-friendly annotated editions of Emma (2015) and Persuasion (2017); her edition of Mansfield Park is forthcoming in 2025. Her most recent publications include an essay on Austen's men and the arts in The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts (2024) and a chapter on two Austen operas for the collection Women and Music in the Age of Austen (2023). She is guest co-curator of the Morgan Library & Museum's A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 exhibition, which will run from June 6th to September 14th, 2025. Juliette will share highlights of her new discoveries about the forgotten and overlooked Americans who, from the 1880s to the 1980s, helped readers appreciate Austen's novels, persuasively advocated for her place in the literary canon, and preserved artifacts vital to her legacy. Expect a sneak preview of the Morgan Library's "A Lively Mind" show. Juliette is the Avery Award speaker for the 2024-2025 season. Sunday, May 4, 2025 2 pm, Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation Elizabeth Porter Austen's London Elizabeth Porter is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. Her current research analyzes the relationship between feminist histories and eighteenth-century studies. With her scholarship appearing (or forthcoming) in Digital Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, and Pedagogy, she has published articles on literary representations of London in the long eighteenth century, writing pedagogy, and feminist writing communities. This presentation analyzes Austen's representation of London in her letters and major novels to argue that the metropolitan setting is key to understanding her life and literature. While some of her literary predecessors linger on the sensory overload of the London season, Austen's engagement with London tends to be subtle and pragmatic. Juxtaposing a selection of Austen's letters with London-based scenes from some of her major novels, this talk considers the varied functions of the metropolis in her fiction, as well as the important role the city played in her life as an author. Dates for next season: September 7, 2025, November 9, 2025, December 14, 2025 (Tea at Gore Place), March 16, 2026, and May 3 or 17, 2026