Jane Austen Festival, Louisville

This festival sounds like great fun! The largest Jane Austen event in North America will take place 14-16 July at Louisville, KY, to celebrate the novelist's enduring legacy. It's sponsored by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Greater Louisville Region.
Dr Cheryl will give a talk on 'The Eulogy Jane Austen Should Have Had', and there will be tours of a Georgian home.
Visitors can enjoy delights including a Regency fashion show, a Grand Ball, afternoon tea, an Emporium, duelling gentlemen, bare-knuckle sparring, bobbin lace-making, archery and a Punch & Judy show.
On the Friday, Lord Nelson and Napoleon will attend, along with an encampment of His Majesty's Royal Navy.

Full dress for February 1805.

For more information, contact Bonny Wise, festival chair at wises496@gmail.com.
You should attend in Regency dress - I look forward to seeing the photos for this amazing event!
If you can't make it to the festival, there's an updated list of Jane Austen bicentenary events in the UK here on the Jane Austen 200 website.

Upcoming Highlights!

January fashions for 1805, Lady's Monthly Museum.

I hope you all had a lovely peaceful Christmas and New Year with family and friends. It's back to normal now after the break - I have got a lot of work to get through in the next few weeks, so my blog may be quiet for a little while. But watch out for my feature on Jane Austen coming soon in the Discover Your Ancestors bookazine, and we have got all the Jane Austen 200 celebrations this year to look forward to, in honour of the bicentenary of her death. Upcoming and ongoing events are listed here.

Treasures on Display: Jane Austen Among Family and Friends

Exciting news for Janeites, especially if you live in, or plan to visit, London in the New Year! To mark the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death, the British Library will stage a new display in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery.
For the first time in four decades, the three notebooks which Austen kept of her teenage writings, plus family letters and memorabilia, will be reunited and on display to the general public.
Volume the First includes short plays and stories such as 'The Beautiful Cassandra'; Volume the Second includes Austen's wonderful 'History of England By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian', 'Lesley Castle', and 'Love and Freindship'; and Volume the Third includes 'Effusions of Fancy' and 'Catharine'.
Austen's writing desk will also be on display with these treasures from the British Library and Bodleian Library collections.
'Jane Austen Among Family and Friends' will be on show from 10 January 2017 – 19 February 2017.
Image from Austen's 'History of England', with illustrations by Cassandra Austen, courtesy of, and copyright, the British Library.