Jane Austen’s Letters: An Intimate Voice
The “true art of letter-writing,” as Jane Austen put it in one of her letters to her dear sister Cassandra, “is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.” The closest we can get to listening in on a private conversation between the Austen sisters is to read these letters. Dr. Wells will highlight memorable lines, as well as passages from Jane’s letters to others that shed light on what we most want to know about her.
Presented by Dr. Juliette Wells, PhD
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. 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 – September 14th, 2025 in New York City.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Price: Free with registration
Location: Community Building Auditorium
Community Building Auditorium