Have you visited The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet? Has the exhibit only whetted your appetite for more Jane Austen? If so, read on!
In February and early March, Nicola's Books will be hosting three Jane Austen Book Club events on February 7th, February 21st, and March 7th. The first two events are highlighted in this blog post. Stay tuned for more news of the March event.
Books under discussion will be available through Nicola’s Books - contact the store directly 734-662-0600 or come in to the store (2513 Jackson Avenue - Westgate Shopping Center.) Nicola’s Books will offer a 15% discount for the purchase of this title when you tell them that the book is for the Jane Austen Book Club. Or, of course, check for availability at AADL or U-M Library.
February 7th at 7:00 pm at Nicola’s Books
Longbourn by Jo Baker
Moderator - Sarah Van Cleve, PhD Student in English University of Michigan
In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, servants are seldom seen and never heard. However, in Longbourn, author Jo Baker takes us below stairs, into a world where the Bennet sisters romantic entanglements are merely the background to one servant girl's own story. Please join us as we approach Austen's world from a new angle.
ISBN 9780345806970
Sarah Van Cleve is a first-year doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She graduated from Princeton University in 2012 with an A.B. in English and Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her junior research was on violence in Jane Austen's juvenilia and Frances Burney's Evelina and her senior thesis was on scenes of reading in George Eliot's novels. She was raised on the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice which she firmly believes has no cinematic equal.
February 21st at 7:00 pm at Nicola’s Books
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld
Moderators - Sigrid Anderson Cordell and Juli McLoone
In 2013, HarperCollins' launched The Austen Project, in which six well-known authors would be invited to re-write Jane Austen's six published novels in contemporary settings. Sigrid Cordell and Juli McLoone, curators of the U-M Library exhibit The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet, will moderate this discussion of Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. In this Cinncinnatti-based rewrite, Jane is a yoga instructor in her late 30s pursuing fertility treatments, Elizabeth is a magazine writer, and the sisters first encounger debonaire doctors Chip Bingley and Fitzwilliam Darcy at a Fourth of July barbecue.
Pride and Prejudice - Penguin Classics ISBN 9780141439518
Eligible - ISBN 9780812980349
Sigrid Anderson Cordell is the Librarian for English Language and Literature and a lecturer in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD in English language and literature from the University of Virginia, and her research focuses on gender and race in nineteenth-century print culture. She is the author of Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century (2010).
Juli McLoone is an Outreach Librarian & Curator in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan. She holds an MA in Library and Information Science, with a Graduate Certificate in Book Studies / Book Arts and Technologies from the University of Iowa, as well as an MA in Anthropology, also from the University of Iowa. Her curatorial portfolio includes a number of areas, including the Special Collections Library's post-1700 General and Rare Collection, the Children's Literature Collection, and the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive.