Persuasions No. 31
The new issue of JASNA’s journal, Persuasions No. 31, has been mailed to members. This collection features essays on siblings in fact and fiction from “Jane Austen’s Brothers and Sisters in the City of Brotherly Love,” the 2009 Annual General Meeting in Philadelphia.
The issue contains plenary essays by Maggie Lane, on Jane Austen’s brothers James and Henry, by Jan Fergus, on tensions in Austen’s fictional sibling relationships, and by John Mullan, on conversations between sisters in the novels. Other essays explore varieties of fraternal and sororal relationships in the fiction, as well as how Austen’s own sibling relationships might be viewed through or might have affected her fiction. Jocelyn Harris examines Austen’s relationship with sister-novelist Frances Burney through the lens of her revisions to the last chapters of Persuasion. Janine Barchas looks at Austen’s use of the sister-art of painting while Linda Slothouber investigates Austen’s connections to Wedgwood.
The Miscellany includes essays on the roots of and revisions to Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, on a source for Catherine Morland’s gothic fantasies and on Catherine Morland’s narrative authority, on the formal relationship between Pride and Prejudice and Emma, on the implications of Brunswick Square in Emma, and on the significance of reading newspapers in Austen’s novels. Click here to see the complete Table of Contents.
In the meantime, more essays from the Philadelphia AGM, including Ruth Perry’s plenary essay, and a delightful Miscellany may be found in Persuasions On-Line 30.1 (published December 16, 2009).
Captain Charles Austen’s ship HMS Cleopatra
from Sheila Johnson Kindred’s essay in Persuasions No. 31