Welcome

This is an open invitation to deepen your pleasure in and enrich your enjoyment of Jane Austen: If you really love Jane Austen, consider joining JASNA (The Jane Austen Society of North America) and JASNA Massachusetts, a local Region of JASNA. We welcome all who enjoy Jane Austen's works. Our JASNA Massachusetts Region is one of the many Regions of the national organization of JASNA. 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 refreshments.

Please note that JASNA national membership does not include membership in the Massachusetts Region. JASNA Massachusetts dues are collected annually (September to August) in lieu of contributions at the door. To renew or start an annual membership, please return a check payable to JASNA-Mass for $15 (regular) or $7.50 (student) to Marianne Redmond, 198 Rock Island Road, Quincy, MA 02169.

All are welcome to pay their dues at the door. Those who are not members of JASNA Massachusetts can simply pay $5.00 for each lecture they attend.

We'd be very pleased to have you join us at our next meeting.

The steering committee has planned some exciting entertainment for the 2012-2013 season! The following events will all be held at 2pm on Sunday at Wheelock College, Brookline Campus, 43 Hawes Street, Brookline, MA. 2pm, September 9, 2012 Ingrid Graff Jane Austen at Home: Houses, Objects and Sense and Sensibility When Jane Austen established herself in Chawton Cottage and found a home conducive to her creativity, a long-suppressed flow of writing was released. The first fruits of this renewed productivity was the revised version of Sense and Sensibilty, a novel very much about home, space and the synthesis created by new homes and marriage. Ingrid Graff will discuss these topics and look at the homes, the objects in them and the way people view them in the first of Austen's published novels. 2pm, October 28, 2012 Kara Dean From JA to YA: Adapting Jane Austen for Young Adults Kara has a blog about her interest in young adult literature. As an added bonus at this meeting, Sandra Lerner will be signing her book, Second Impressions, written under the pen name Ava Farmer. She spent 26 working on this book, doing meticulous research. It is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, set ten years after Jane Austen's novel. Sandra Lerner is famous among Janeites for rescuing Chawton House from developers, and established it as a center for the study of English women's writing. 3pm, December 16, 2012: Birthday Celebration On the Actual Anniversary! Elsa Solender In honor of this auspicious day, Elsa Solender, past president of JASNA, will present her new novel JANE AUSTEN IN LOVE: An Entertainment. In this book blending fact and fiction, she explores Jane Austen's life and fills in some of the gaps by imagining Jane's sister Cassandra as the narrator. The book is available on Amazon as an eBook. As an additional entertainment, Somerville's Theatre@First will present a scene from their recent production of Pride and Prejudice. Brigid Battell as Elizabeth Bennet, and John Deschene as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, from Theatre@First. 2pm, March 10, 2013 Marcia Folsom Professor of Literature at Wheelock College, Boston Power in Mansfield Park: Austen's Study of Domination and Resistance Austen's supreme examination of power and of resistance to that power is Mansfield Park. Two works by James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, offer fascinating tools to identify ways that the powerful exercise their power in this novel, and the "weapons" used by the weak to resist coercion. This talk considers the "hidden transcripts" of Sir Thomas Bertram and Henry Crawford's thoughts, and of Fanny Price's spoken and silent resistance. 2pm, May 5, 2013 John Gould The writer John Gould is a favorite speaker with the Boston region of JASNA. He has a web page describing his fascinating career. This talk is entitled This Little World - This England - and Jane Austen Click here to review the meetings that were held during the 2010 - 2011 season and the 2011 - 2012 season. JASNA JASNA's Annual General Meeting (AGM) takes place in the fall of each year in a different city in the United States or Canada. The AGM attracts about six hundred participants, bringing together scholars and lay readers of Austen to explore her life and works from multiple perspectives. Future AGM's Minneapolis, MN September 27-29, 2013 Theme: The 200th Anniversary of Pride & Prejudice Montréal, Québec, Canada, Oct. 10-12, 2014 Theme: Mansfield Park in Montréal: Contexts, Conventions and Controversies Louisville, KY USA, Oct. 9-11, 2015 Theme: Living in Jane Austen's World Washington, D.C. USA, Oct. 21-23, 2016 Theme: Emma at 200: No One But Herself To learn more about JASNA, our parent organization, visit www.jasna.org.