It might look like a scene from yet another Jane Austen production, but this is no set.The British town of Bath recently held a celebration of the author 250 years after her birth. This historic English town was channeling the early 1800s, the period when Austen's novels were published.
"Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility," and "Emma" were among those Anne Perng grew up reading: "The issues that she speaks of – the economy, class, family, sisters – still so resonate with us today."Fifteen thousand tickets were sold for this year's 10-day Jane Austen Festival, a level of enthusiasm that surprised even its organizer, Georgia Delve: "Two of her novels are based here," she said."So, you can walk in her footsteps down the streets.
You've got character names on streets, you've got places she visited.It's just the feeling of being in that world that she inhabited that makes it so special."Writer Devoney Looser said, "She has written books that are endlessly re-readable." "It's not enough to read it once?" I asked. "Well, I don't think so.
There's something new to find every time."Looser's ties to the author are not just professional: "My husband is also a Jane Austen scholar," she said."We met and had a fight over Jane Austen the day we met.""What a love story!" I said.
"Yeah, that's what he'd say, too!" In her book, "Wild for Austen," Looser argues the author is hardly plain, prim, and proper: "It's there in her writings – this idea of women being positively wild.Unconventional, more free, more artless, and willing to combine feeling and thoughtfulness with intellectual ability.
That this is the kind of thing she set out to celebrate in her heroines, at a time where women were supposed to be ideally passive and not very thinking." Austen died at age 41 after suffering a range of ailments.She wrote just six novels (two published after her death). Looser said, "You can read her on the level of the word, ...