JASNA-NY Regional Meeting and Biennial Elections December 2022

“For Jane Austen, the writer synonymous with the marriage plot, we would expect the widow to be a comparatively minor figure. But we may be surprised to recall how pervasive and variable her story can be. To look just at Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), we find a story crowded with widows: Mrs. Dashwood (the mother of our sister protagonists); Mrs. Smith (Willoughby’s disapproving aunt); Mrs. Ferrars (the controlling matriarch whose extension and denial of approval is one engine of the plot); and Mrs. Jennings, one of Austen’s merry fools, a rather neglected figure on whom I will focus my attention in this talk. I will provide some historical and legal context for the widow’s unique role as a woman in control of her own finances, but my primary interest will be the way that Austen uses Mrs. Jennings to play with the reader’s expectations about social status, romance, and narrative.”

Stephanie Insley Hershinow is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches courses on the novel, eighteenth-century culture, and world literature. She is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (JHUP, 2019) and the editor of Jane Austen’s Emma and Sense and Sensibility for W.W. Norton. She serves at co-editor of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries and chairs the Columbia Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture. She is currently working on two books: one on the relationship between legal and literary conceptions of personhood, and another on Jane Austen’s storytelling techniques. Dr. Hershinow holds a BA from College of William and Mary, an MA from the University of York, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Cost: $25

OR

The following have been nominated:

·    Regional Coordinator – Fran Winter and Sarah Rose Kearns

·    Secretary – Fran Schulz

·    Treasurer – Christina Feicht

·    Assistant Treasurer – Diane Mangasarian