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Persuasions #10, 1988                                                                                                                                            Page 21

 

Reflections at a Jane Austen Meeting:

Tracing the Footsteps of Jane Austen

 

RHEA R. HILKEVITCH, PhD.

Chicago, Illinois

 

Stretching the literary mind …

Where is it in the story?

Locale and historical period?

 

Into the past … not genealogy,

God forbid …

Trace the genetic endowment

into the place setting

into the immediacy of the present…

 

Search for the eternal verities

To scratch at least the surface

Along the paths of immortality

with sensibility (not careless love)

in Jane Austen’s England.

 

February 13, 1988