In Which I Recount My Adventures at the Jane Austen Conference

(Otherwise known as the Jane Austen Society of North America's Annual General Meeting, or JASNA AGM)

“The pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinions will make good amends for orange wine.”
—letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra, June 20 1808

I wanted to start this recap of my Austen Conference Experience with a pithy Jane Austen quote, but found myself struggling to choose one because many of her funniest quips about social events are of a negative bent. Austen was fully unreserved when writing to her sister Cassandra, and her voice is more acerbic in private correspondence than in fiction. (I love it.) However, my experience at what some of my friends lovingly referred to as AustenCon and what I shall properly refer to as the AGM was of a decidedly positive bent. And I didn’t have any orange wine, distasteful or otherwise. (Although I did try a little wine of a different sort and heartily disliked it.) So here we are.

WARNING: this is very long.

As I begin this recap I must explain that in order for me to write it at all, and not procrastinate for another six weeks (whoops), I shall have to do it in a purely stream-of-consciousness fashion, informal as all get-out, and that if a clinically objective and academic review of the JASNA AGM is what you seek, my Substack is probably not going to be a haven of dry erudition for you.

I embarked on this journey with my best friend Melody, and I wrote about my efforts to raise money for the trip under “The Summer of Jane Austen” heading here on Substack. (I won’t recap everything here, but briefly: this special trip happened in large part because of all of YOU, and your kind attention to the things that I write and your generosity in helping to fund my time at the AGM, and I am very grateful for that.) We came from our respective homes via car and plane and spent three days in Cleveland, Ohio at a conference hotel luxurious enough to feel quite decadent and sophisticated, and not quite so luxurious as to have a working toilet in our en suite bathroom. More on that in a moment.

We arrived in Cleveland after an early on-the-road dinner on a Thursday evening in mid-October. Technically the conference did not begin in earnest until the next morning, but early festivities and what the conference calls “special sessions” had started on Wednesday. We managed to secure seats at “She Played and Sang: Austen’s Music” which I had assumed would be a lecture on early nineteenth-century music, but turned out to be a lovely concert of piano and vocal performance. Laura Klein and Gillian Dooley delighted us, but not long enough. I would have gladly listened to more (though if there had been other young ladies who wanted to exhibit I would have liked that too. I am not musical myself but had I ever learnt I am sure I should have been a true proficient. Okay that’s enough.)

Upon returning to our humble abode abovestairs, we set about sewing. I forgot to mention earlier that one of the highlights of this conference is the Saturday night banquet and ball. In true Melody-and-Amy fashion, we had both begun gowns for the festivities and neither had finished. Melody had been sewing in the car as we drove from the airport to the hotel, and I had been frantically finishing bits and pieces at my home before departing that morning. (Then I left my nicely puffed, finished sleeves sitting pretty on my sewing table. BAH HUMBUG. That’s the wrong author for this but I’ll leave it in.) Some of this delay on my part had been due to procrastination, but in fairness to myself a great deal of it was in fact because my children kept getting sick and being wakeful and not letting me have any sewing time &c. &c.

So there we were, with The Office playing on the TV and the sewing machine humming and the clock ticking the hours away until Dreadfully Late, and then the bathroom toilet overflowed. In the interest of fairness to my bestie, she was not the one who caused it; it was I. I shall spare you any gruesome details but let us just say it was a very perplexing sort of toilet overflow because there was no reason it should have happened, if you catch my drift. There then ensued a perfect storm of calling the front desk and having them send up a couple of janitorial professionals and then those persons having to call their superior to look at this piece of perplexing plumbing, and it all culminated in the toilet finally being “fixed” at midnight, whereupon we went to bed.

(It wasn’t fixed but we didn’t KNOW that yet.)

We did not exactly have shining morning faces as Friday’s sun rose, but no matter. Onward. The conference began in earnest on this day, and we enjoyed a whirlwind day of lectures and presentations. A particular highlight was keynote speaker Susan Allen Ford (editor of the JASNA journal Persuasions), whose address focused on Austen’s own reading material. She mentioned the 1811 novel Self-Control, of which Austen had little opinion (her review for Cassandra was quite withering) but of which she had a nervous anticipation: “I am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever— & of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.” I believe the contemporary colloquial expression of how this quote made me feel is that the long-deceased Austen has “read me to filth.” I feel CALLED OUT. Someday I will write a novel, but are all the good ones taken already? Food for thought.

Speaking of food, we splurged on Friday for the soup and salad buffet at the hotel restaurant, and I am not exaggerating when I say that the dairy-free cream of cauliflower soup was quite possibly the best soup I’ve ever eaten. I must figure out a way to make it at home. This recipe looks promising.

Brenda Cox led a breakout session on “Jane Austen and the Evangelicals” which we greatly enjoyed. As an Anglican-curious somewhat-evangelical myself, it was a fascinating perspective on Austen’s personal faith and the religious movements of her era. I took a LOT of notes during this talk and look forward to reading Brenda’s book, Fashionable Goodness. (Brenda Cox also wrote a lovely and more organized and less silly recap of the AGM which you can read here.)

In between all the flurry of attending sessions and learning a great deal, we were frantically sewing as quickly as we could. Trying to finish our ball dresses certainly added some stress to the trip, but it also fostered some fun bonding time in the hotel room over our mutual work (and marathon of The Office.) I wonder if Jane Austen ever wrote anything about sewing a gown at the last minute. I feel inspired to go through her letters and find out. I’ll report back.

Anyway, speaking of sewing, we were greatly delighted to attend a talk by Hilary Davidson, author of Dress in the Age of Jane Austen and Jane Austen’s Wardrobe. This is tailor-made Amy-appealing content. (See what I did there? See? See?) I reveled in it. Hilary made a replica of Austen’s silk pelisse which you may observe beside my grinning visage in this image:

After this lecture we saw a splendid fashion show that featured reproductions of gowns spanning Austen’s lifetime, from 1775 to about 1815. (She died in 1817, in case you didn’t know. Well, even if you did know, she still died in 1817. Your knowledge of the fact has no bearing on its existence.) I don’t have permission to publicly share any of my pictures from this event but just take my word for it that these dresses were really lovely and it was great fun to see them side-by-side with (photos of) the original gowns and portraits that inspired them.

This is as good a time as any— that is, wholly irrelevant— to mention that at the same time as the JASNA AGM, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (also in Cleveland) was inducting new honorees and the hotel was buzzing with famous people and rumors of famous people. If reports were true, Cher and Mary J. Blige and Ozzy Osbourne were staying at our hotel. I spied none of these august personages but I did spot a Red Hot Chili Pepper outside the hotel signing autographs. A musician, not a fruit. Autographs would be a tricky thing for a fruit.

The toilet overflowed a few more times and it was most annoying. We are still not sure what caused it. Possibly some other guest had flushed a bar of soap or a washcloth or maybe a bag of gold doubloons or wads of bills or bundles of drugs? Who knows. At any rate the hotel offered us the option of switching rooms but we had all our sewing laid out higgledy-piggledy and so we declined and were just Very Careful with the bathroom. And we did not flush any contraband material.

On Saturday, Patricia A. Matthew gave a plenary lecture on reading Austen on and in the margins; the intersection of race and the Regency and the impact of British women’s sugar boycott on the slave trade. She talked of her visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, and about how “studying history is a way of tending a legacy.” I have not been able to stop thinking about that. I hope we are tending this legacy well.

I had the delightful good fortune of not only attending the breakout session of, but also meeting the lovely Breckyn Wood, who hosts the official JASNA podcast Austen Chat. Breckyn’s breakout session, “Good Tenses Make Good Neighbors” was on Austen’s use of grammar to shape her characterization, and this exceedingly nerdy topic (doubly so!!) spoke to my heart. Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out how many of them there are in the world.

Speaking of kindred spirits, Austen intersected with another of my favorite authors, Lucy Maud Montgomery, in a breakout session by Sarah Emsley. Sarah spoke on “Stealing Sources and Avoiding Consequences in Jane Austen’s Fiction” in one of those delightful lectures that raises more questions than it answers. (This is a good thing!) Where do we draw the line between “stealing” and borrowing ideas? How much of real life is an author entitled to draw on when writing fiction? Is there really anything new under the sun? (Sarah also spoke on L.M. Montgomery in this session and if you read her blog which I linked above, you’ll find a treasure trove of posts commemorating Montgomery’s 150th birthday.)

I had planned to be as judicious as possible with my funds on this trip, but couldn’t resist purchasing the cutest Pride and Prejudice t-shirt from Jane Austen Treasures. I am saying this of my own free will and not out of any paid partnership (although I’m open to sponsors! Feel free to get in touch!) but they are the perfect online gift shop for the Janeite in your life. My shirt is soft, comfortable, flattering AND nerdy— the perfect quadrafecta. (Is that a word? Let’s make it one.)

Now I come to the most stressful part of the weekend, a title you might reasonably think would be held by the bathroom shenanigans, but you would be incorrect because it was about my confounded dress. It is advisable to all young ladies who wish to be heroines that they complete their gowns BEFORE they attend balls and promenades and the like, and moreover that they check their seam allowances very carefully when working with extremely flimsy fabrics such as lining-weight silks. Do you see where I’m going with this? You probably do. My dress was barely finished in time, and when it was, it was too small across the back but too large across the shoulders, resulting in a much-too-scooped back and buttons that only barely met their buttonholes. Provoking.

This is the sort of time when a Best Friend is called for, and a Best Friend is invaluable, and I cannot thank Melody enough for working her magic with pins and things. I managed to move the buttons enough to get the dress to stay together, and Melody managed to insert some flowers in a way that covered up the worst of my visible stays (horror!) and I managed to actually go to the banquet that preceded the ball, albeit late.

You can see here that it all looked mostly all right from the front (and my Regency underthings did their duty quite nicely too)—

—but the illusion failed a bit in the rear. Oh well. I have learnt some lessons in the making of this dress and I shall try not to repeat them. My hair turned out very nicely at least and for that I’m thankful. I was a little nervous that the feather headdress would be a bit too Caroline-Bingley-esque but in reality it just distracted from the fact that the top of my shift was quite visible. At least it was a fully hand-sewn shift with the most minuscule rolled hem. Come to think of it, perhaps if I had spent less time hand sewing the shift, which is not MEANT to be seen, and more time measuring and trying on my dress as I was making it, I would not have needed to be thankful for the niceness of my underthings. Much to consider.

Melody, as you can see, looked lovely and put-together, because she wisely chose to use an existing dress and simply trim and accessorize it for this occasion. I shall bear that in mind for future festivities. I also figured that since I was letting the whole world see the back of my shift I may as well go the whole way and reveal some ankle as well. Not sure what got into me. Perhaps it was the one (1) disgusting sip of champagne at the banquet, which I did not care for. I am affirmed in my prejudiced belief that alcohol continues to be a waste of time and taste buds.

What can be said about a ball? What can convey the delights of dancing and of live music and of a merry company, to any one who has not actually been there? I did not dance every dance, not because gentlemen were scarce (they certainly were, but no matter; that has never stopped Melody and me in the past) but because I was quite tired and also wanted to talk to people. We did, however, noteworthily dance Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot, which astute readers will know is the dance that Elizabeth dances with Mr. Darcy at the Netherfield ball in Pride and Prejudice 1995— and really astute readers will know is danced anachronistically in that film (the choreography was amended to look better on camera and to throw the two main characters more together). We did the movie version. It was not historical, but it was great fun.

At the ball, I had the privilege of meeting Syrie James, author of The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, as well as Breckyn Wood, host of the Austen Chat podcast and whose breakout session I had so enjoyed the day before. Earlier in the weekend, I chatted with Dr. Inger Brodey because I had unwittingly sat beside her for a special session; at breakfast that morning, Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen’s House in Chawton (!) had sat at our table. I found out later that the last two are people of such note in the Austen community; they were so modest, unassuming, and generally charming that I assumed they must just be run-of-the-mill fans like myself. (Syrie James and Breckyn Wood were wonderful too! But I knew who they were already.) That is one of the things I loved most about this amalgamation of Janeites: the camaraderie and friendliness from the most revered scholars to people like me who just like to read. It’s a wonderful testament to the power of good books.

The next morning was, I fear, a bit of a haze amid lack of sleep. I remember that there was a nice lecture during breakfast on “Jane Austen and the Jurassic,” about Mary Anning’s discovery of fossils at Lyme (which of course has Austen ties due to Persuasion and Jane’s own visits there). But I was very tired and wanted to eat eggs and pastry. (Perhaps this inclination has something to do with the dress debacle. Much to consider.) Next year’s AGM, to be held in Baltimore (so near to me!!) was announced, amid much fanfare. (It was at this time that I discovered Dr. Brodey would be a keynote speaker next year. And since I’ve now listened to her interview in Austen Chat, I’m even more determined to try and go to the 2025 AGM.)

Everything thereafter was a hustle and bustle of packing up and getting the car out of the parking garage and checking out and leaving the (extremely crowded, due to football happenings) city. I managed to have lunch with a wonderful friend from Twitter before we left Ohio (I’m not on Twitter anymore, by the by, but you can find me on Bluesky) and Melody and I spent a lovely five hours driving back to my home and talking it all over. That’s such a vital part of any trip— the talking-over afterward.

Writing all this up for you has been its own kind of talking-over, and I regret that it took me such a long time to do, but such is life! (I anticipate having something very exciting to announce to you all very soon, by the way, which will explain why my writing time has not been as devoted to this post as it ought to have been.) You, my wonderful friends, were the reason I was able to take this dream of a trip. You made it possible and I still can’t quite believe it. Once upon a time when I was a naive sixteen-year-old blogging verbosely about Jane Austen and various period dramas, I don’t think I ever could have imagined that someday I’d be at the AGM for the second time (!) and that it would all be because of the kindred spirits who read my blog today. I’m so very grateful. Thank you.

I shall close this with the perfect closing quote for a rambling personal missive:

“I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived — my breakfast supplied only two ideas — that the rolls were good and the butter bad.”
—letter of Jane Austen dated June 19, 1799