Department of English, History & Geography and Music and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Program to host anniversary symposium celebrating novelists Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf

Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are among the most influential English novelists in literary history known for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Mrs. Dalloway”, respectively.

Now, Elon University’s Department of English, History and Music, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexualities program is inviting the community to “Celebrating Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf: An Anniversary Symposium” from Nov. 4-6 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth and the 100th anniversary of Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”.

Austen’s novels explore the moral, material and emotional lives of women navigating the constraints of the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ marriage market.

“In spite of her reputation as a charming romance writer, Jane Austen is not as polite, kind or innocent as sometimes advertised,” said Professor Rosemary Haskell. “Letters reveal a sharper side. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, for example, Austen writes, ‘Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’”

Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” follows upper-class Clarissa Dalloway through a single day in 1920s London as she plans a party that will bring together friends and former lovers, only to be overshadowed by the tragedy of a World War I veteran’s suicide.

“Virginia Woolf explored the lives of women in both fiction and nonfiction,” Haskell said. “Her 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ argues women need both the space, the time and the money to be artists. As Woolf speculates, ‘What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say?’”

The symposium will feature music, student poster presentations, lectures and a film screening.

Tuesday, Nov. 4

Who Do You Play For? Music and Meaning in Jane Austen

Associate Professor of Music Douglas Jurs and his students will perform music inspired by Austen’s works.
Whitley Auditorium | 4:30 – 5:30 p.m.

Student Poster Presentation

Students in Professor Megan Isaac’s “Senior English Seminar” and Professor Janet Myers’s “British Women Novelists” courses will present research on the works of Austen and Woolf.
LaRose Student Commons Room 200 | 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.

Lightning Lectures

Three brief lectures by Professor Rosemary Haskell, Assistant Teaching Professor Craig Morehead and Professor Michael Carignan from the Department of History will explore the lives and times of Austen and Woolf.
LaRose Student Commons Room 200 | 6:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, Nov. 5

Film Screening: “Mrs. Dalloway”

Enjoy a screening of “Mrs. Dalloway,” based on Woolf’s celebrated novel, with opening remarks by Assistant Professor Dan Burns.
McEwen Screening Room 013 | 8 p.m.

Thursday, Nov. 6

Guest Lecturer on Austen

Inger Brodey, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will lecture on, “Revisiting Jane Austen’s Happy Endings after 250 Years,” to examine the problematic endings of Austen’s novels, which are conveniently romantically happy, but also contain disturbing implications. Brodey’s book, “Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness” was published in 2024 by John Hopkins University Press.
McBride Gathering Space, Numen Lumen Pavilion | Reception at 6:30 p.m., Lecture at 7 p.m.