Jane Austen in Williamsburg: Report from the JASNA AGM – Part 2

My panel talk was over, and was well received; anxiety over the Author Signing event was relieved by the fun and delight of friends old and new coming up to buy my book and chat. So now there was nothing left to do at the JASNA annual general meeting in Williamsburg, VA, but to let my hair down, relax, and enjoy myself!

Actually it was putting my hair up. For the next event was the Saturday evening banquet and ball.  “Do not beat me,” as Mrs. Weston said in Emma, if I confess that I am not a fan of dressing up. This probably derives from a lingering unease and conviction that short and round persons are not best suited to the Regency gown silhouette.  Still, such concerns don’t stop people of all shapes and sizes from wearing lovely and original gowns, be they rented, boughten, or hand-made; and I have a blue number made for me by fellow Janeite author C. Allyn Pierson that has twirled at several meetings in past  years. Sometimes I wear one shawl with it, sometimes another; this time I had a sort of flowery fairy tiara that I bought extremely cheaply on Etsy.  I could not conceive of wearing such an item in ordinary life, but somehow, when I tried it on with my tried-and-true blue, well, it had a sort of deliriously cheerful appearance (despite digging its metallic spikes into my temples).

The banquet was lovely, with good company and good food, though the only perceptable glitch in the entire conference occurred toward the end, as the food was served very slowly to the 850 eaters, which meant that the promenade (meant to give the staff time to clear out the ballroom tables for the dancing) began terribly late. Costumed Janeites made a rather chilly circuit of Williamsburg, but I stayed comfortably within, roaming around taking pictures until I was so tired that I barely made it to my room before crashing to sleep on the bed in full costume, awakening several hours later in some discomfort (though at least I’d taken off the tiara!).  This is not to say the evening wasn’t fun – it was, especially the swirling excitement as you kept bumping into people you remembered from previous AGMs, and squealing and admiring their period dress.

Sunday, the closing plenary speech, delivered at brunch, was my one of my favorite talks of all. This was delivered by Professor Robert E. Moore of Vanderbilt University, and it was about “Jane Austen and the Reformation.”  Couldn’t sound duller, right?  Wrong!  This man was a spellbinding speaker, and a superb thinker about Jane Austen. The conference theme was Northanger Abbey, and he proceeded to tell us about the despoilation of the monasteries in the 16th century, when many abbeys fell into the hands of families like the Tilneys in Northanger Abbey.  A man like General Tilney used his estate only for his own luxury and gain, but other such landowners, like Mr. Knightley of Emma‘s Donwell Abbey, were by contrast responsible, ideal landlords. Through Moore’s talk we began to see both Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen’s thoughts and intentions in an entirely new, long term historical light.  The talk was particularly interesting to me because, for my sequel The Bride of Northanger, I’d done considerable delving into the subject…Netley Abbey, which Austen visited, and was an inspiration for her, appears on my book cover in a painting by Constable.  And I gave much thought to monks and curses and superstitions! Yet it wasn’t only because I’d been steeped in the Gothic that I enjoyed this talk – it seemed to have the same mind-opening effect on many.

Professor Moore at Netley Abbey

Afterwards. though, I felt like the young people in Mansfield Park, who “meeting with an outward door, temptingly open on a flight of steps which led immediately to turf and shrubs, and all the sweets of pleasure–grounds, as by one impulse, one wish for air and liberty, all walked out.”  I had already walked from one end of the main Williamsburg thoroughfare to the other, and dined at two of the charming taverns; but wanted to go farther afield, somewhere scenic and historic and memorable. That would be Jamestown. But how to get there?  At seven miles off, it was beyond shuttle service and I had no car; but with daring modernity I and my companion Carol (a member of my Los Angeles reading group) summoned a Lyft, and found ourselves riding, enchanted, through the really lovely, deeply green Virginia countryside. What forests, hills and meadows!  And then we came to the broad expanse of the James River, and could only sigh with pleasure and enchantment at such beauty.

By the James River

We joined an archeologist who was starting a short tour, showing the grounds and excavations, and telling the extremely interesting details of the diggings. She explained about research being done on bodies of people who had died in the terrible Starving Time of 1609, how one girl (called, by a dark serendipity “Jane”) was cannibalized. It was possible to tell which settlers had come recently from England (where their diet was wheat) and which had lived longer in Virginia (corn diet), and much else. Jamestown was both beautiful and stirred the historical imagination, and we were completely satisfied with our day.

Shirley Plantation

The following day, the conference was over, but I had signed up for an after-conference tour of some of the plantations on the James River, which was the perfect outgrowth of my Jamestown trip. A happy busload of Janeites was taken to the beautiful old Shirley Plantation, still in the hands of the same family for centuries, and the best preserved in terms of furniture and buildings, perhaps because the family’s women nursed some Yankee soldiers who were sick there, and the house was spared destruction in consequence. Grounds and riverside were lovely, and I particularly adored a 350-year old willow tree. There was more talk about the family history than about slavery; but it was impossible to forget the haunting knowledge that this was, for all its idyllic beauty today, a place founded on slavery.  A chilling undercurrent to the effortlessly seductive loveliness, and a troubling feeling that this part of the past was still kept out of sight.

350-year-old tree at Shirley Plantation

Garden at Berkeley Plantation

The next plantation was Berkeley, most notable to me for its long gardens going down to the river, spectacularly beautiful.  Again, little said about slavery, but the kitchen, a brick house and separate building, had quarters upstairs for the slaves who worked there. Any wooden structures had been burned years ago. It was undeniably something of a relief that the third house on the trip was not a grand plantation, but a regular old-fashioned farm, Peace Hill Farm, a real working farm that was yes, an extraordinarily peaceful and beautiful place.  A hundred acres dating from the Colonial era, it was our bountiful provider of a fantastically wonderful tea, which some enjoyed indoors, though I was of the party that stuffed in my English tea sandwiches, scones and cream, cookies and eggs, ham and cheese, while seated beneath the lovely, barely autumnal trees.  It was a perfect and peaceful finish to my JASNA adventure.

Peace Hill Farm

Tea at Peace Hill Farm

My plate at Peace Hill Farm!

Talks – books – Janeites – period dress – banquets – balls – taverns – beautiful Virginia – friends, and lots and lots of talk about Jane Austen.  When Mr. Tilney said about Bath, “Here you are in pursuit only of amusement all day long,” he might have been talking of our happy experiences at Williamsburg two hundred years later!  And for me, of course, there was the special bonus of it having been the site of my book’s debut…