Over the last eight years, we’ve marked a plethora of Jane Austen anniversaries: the bicentennials of the publications of all six of her novels (2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018) and the bicentennial of her death (2017). It’s lucky we’ve had all that practice, because 2019 will bring us three more notable Austen anniversaries – or, to be exact, three Austen-fandom anniversaries:
--Thirty years ago, the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA) was founded. A birthday party is already scheduled for December 14, just two days ahead of Austen’s own 244th.
--Forty years ago, the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) marked its debut with an October 5 dinner at Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel, attended by one hundred guests and covered in the New Yorker magazine. On the same evening this year, about six times that many people will raise a glass to JASNA in Williamsburg, Virginia, the site of this year’s Annual General Meeting. The conference theme is “200 Years of Northanger Abbey.” Actually, it’s 201 years, but who’s counting?
--Seventy years ago, the most beloved Austen pilgrimage site, Jane Austen’s House Museum – aka Chawton cottage, the house in Hampshire, England, where Austen wrote or revised all six of her completed novels – welcomed its first visitors. On the July 23 anniversary of the opening, the museum’s first seventy visitors will get in for the 1949 admission price (about a quarter of the current cost), and four days later everyone is invited to a birthday party.
After all the partying, by this time next year, you may feel inclined to take a breather. But don’t get too comfortable: 2020 marks the eightieth anniversary of the UK Jane Austen Society, the world’s first, whose initial goal was the raising of money to preserve Chawton cottage. And once that anniversary is safely over, it will be time to start thinking about the biggie just over the horizon: 2025, the two hundred and fiftieth year since Austen’s birth.
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