Life and Work of Jane Austen (Virtual)

Do you read Jane Austen? Have you seen the many TV and commercial films based on her novels and supposedly on her life?  Want the real scoop on Jane Austen?

 Learn about Jane Austen (1775-1817) and her world. Joan Ray is the  only 3-term President of the Jane Austen Society of North America (2000-2006) and after that (2006-2016), President of the North American Friends of Chawton House Library (Chawton House, once owned by Jane’s brother and which she called “The Great House” when she dined there); author of numerous articles on Jane Austen, as well as Jane Austen for Dummies (Wiley), Simply Austen (Great Lives Series), and the 2-volume reference work (loaded with footnotes) Dictionary of Literary Biography, Jane Austen (Gale Group, the go-to volumes for Austen scholars and found in almost all University Library Reference Rooms and the British Library’s Humanities Reference Room).

 Joan is a scholar of 18th -century British literature, a period of writing modelled on the Horatian ideal in his Ars Poetica (19 BC) that literature should delight and instruct. Joan likes to follow that model in her presentations. Joan likes to show rare photos and images of Austen's world in her presentations.