The Jane Austen’s House Museum has announced a lecture that may be of interest to our readers. This is the T Edward Carpenter Memorial Lecture: “Jane Austen and the English Comic Tradition” by Dr Paula Byrne at the National Portrait Gallery, London. As described in the Museum’s announcement:
Literary biographer and leading scholar of Jane Austen Dr Paula Byrne explores the novelist’s roots in the comic theatre, her own supreme comic gifts, and her influence on subsequent novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Pym.
In addition to her 2009 work Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, Dr Byrne has written widely on Jane Austen. In January 2013, to coincide with the bicentenary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice, she published an innovative biography called The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, which became a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. More recently, she published The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why she is a Hit in Hollywood (an expanded and updated revision of her first book). Dr Byrne’s debut novel, Look to your Wife, was published in April 2018. She has also lectured at conferences of the Evelyn Waugh Society in Downside Abbey and University of Leicester. The lecture to the Downside conference was notably delivered in a coach transporting the delegates between Downside Abbey and Combe Florey. Dr Byrne is a graduate of the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University.
The lecture is sponsored by the Jane Austen’s House Museum, Chawton, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery. It is scheduled for Friday, 2 November at 7:00pm in the Ondaatje Wing Theatre, National Portrait Gallery, London. Tickets: £10 (£8 concessions and NPG Supporters) are available here.
