Marcia Folsom, Professor of Literature at Wheelock College, Boston, was the speaker on Sunday, November 13 at 2pm. Marcia's topic was First and Second: Sisters, Suitors, and Novels.

Alistair Duckworth gave a talk on Sunday, March 18, 2012, at 2pm. Alistair is Professor Emeritus of the University of Florida, and author of The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Many of his books are available on Amazon. His topic for this event was Three Ways of Looking At Manners.

While everyone agrees that Jane Austen is a novelist of manners, little agreement exists even on such a basic question as whether she was an upholder or a critic of polite conduct. Edward Bertram's argument that manners should ideally work in the service of religion and morality fails to persuade some readers. In the talk Alistair described first a suspicious approach that views manners as a means of keeping a traditional social and gender structure in place. Then he examined a "camp" approach to manners that celebrates wit and style as an escape from conventional social roles. Finally, he looked at the question of manners in the contexts of the competing ideas of Hannah More and Lord Chesterfield.

Alistair was the Avery Fund speaker for this season.


Lauren Willig, author of The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and the series of eight books following, was our guest speaker on Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 2pm. Lauren's topic was Austen's Accidental Afterlife: Jane and her Regency World in Modern Fiction. Lauren talked about the ways in which Jane Austen and the world she writes about have been coopted and adapted, both in the Regency romance genre and in mainstream fiction; the various ways in which she and her era have been represented and misrepresented; and then, as a specific instance of this, her experiences trying to write Jane and her unfinished The Watsons into Lauren's novel Mischief of the Mistletoe and the challenges that presented.