Event Details

Join us in the Archives Research Centre to celebrate the 250th birthday of the author Jane Austen...

Join us in the Archives Research Centre to celebrate the 250th birthday of the author Jane Austen. This will be a drop-in event with scheduled sessions celebrating Jane Austen’s life and looking at festive traditions from the Regency period (c. 1795-1837).

Throughout the afternoon we will have a display of books from our Special Collections and Archives written by Austen and other contemporary authors from the Regency period and playing music from the period.

Other sessions during the afternoon include:

• 1pm-2pm: An introduction to Quill Art: Quilling, decorating objective with rolled paper, was a popular pastime for young ladies in the late 18th and the early 19th century. Liz Fawcett, our Special Collections and Archives Library Assistant, will take you through creating festive designs using strips of paper.

• 3pm-4pm: Reading Austen Now: 250 years after her birth, Jane Austen’s fiction is as popular as ever. This talk, by Professor Michael Greaney, author of An A-Z of Jane Austen (2022), will explore what makes novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma so irresistibly re-readable.