Hostname: page-component-5db58dd55d-lqwgf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-31T08:27:04.234Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aging with Austen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan S. Lanser
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings since 1975, as my hastily consulted curriculum vitae proclaimed? hough rhetorical, the questions prompted a nostalgic encounter with a few nearly forgotten conference talks and a deeper contemplation of the person who delivered them. (How) had my reading and writing altered across the decades in which I moved from graduate student through the tenure ranks to professor emerita? What had it meant to age as a reader? Or, for the purposes of this short meditation, what had it meant to age as a reader of Jane Austen, whose presence threads through my teaching and writing from beginning to not-yet end?

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 654 - 660
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Adams, Jennifer. Pride and Prejudice: A BabyLit Counting Primer. Gibbs Smith, 2011.Google Scholar
Auden, W.H. “Letter to Lord Byron.” Collected Poems, edited by Mendelson, Edward, Random House, 1991, pp. 79–113.Google Scholar
Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. edited by Chapman, R.W., Oxford UP, 1969. 6.vols.Google Scholar
Austen, Jane. “To Cassandra Austen.” 6 Nov. 1813. Letters, edited by Faye, Deirdre Le, Oxford UP, 1995, p. 251.Google Scholar
Baker, Jo. Longbourn: A Novel. Random House, 2013.Google Scholar
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. Methuen, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, Katinka. “Old Readers: Slow Readers or Expert Readers?” he Psychology and Sociology of Literature: In Honor of Elrud Ibsch, edited by Schram, Dick and Steen, Gerard, J. Benjamins, 2001, pp. 87–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doerr, Harriet. Consider his, Senora. Harcourt Brace, 1993.Google Scholar
Favret, Mary. “Austen's Whiteness.” Jane Austen at Two Hundred. MLA Annual Convention, 6 Jan. 2017, Philadelphia Convention Center.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, Joshua K., and Laura T. Germine. “When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities across the Life Span.” Psychological Science, vol. 26, no. 4, 2015, pp. 433–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1927. U of Illinois P, 1965.Google Scholar
Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. Icon Books, 2016.Google Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,‘ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 415–41.Google Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. “No Connections Subsequent: Sisters and Sisterhood in the Life and Novels of Jane Austen.” he Sister Bond: A Feminist View of a Timeless Connection, edited by McNaron, Toni A.H., Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 51–68.Google Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830. U of Chicago P, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel. Verso, 1998.Google Scholar
Radvansky, G.A. “Aging, Memory, and Comprehension.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 8, no. 2, 1999, pp. 49–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, 1991, pp. 818–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simonton, Dean Keith. “Creative Productivity: A Predictive and Explanatory Model of Career Trajectories and Landmarks.” Psychological Review, vol. 104, no. 1, 1997, pp. 66–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Harvard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. On Rereading. Harvard UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warman, Caroline. Introduction. “he Nobleman” and Other Romances, by Isabelle de Charrière, translated by Warman, Penguin Books, 2012, pp. xi-xxiv.Google Scholar
The Woman of Colour: A Tale. 1808. Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique, Broadview, 2008.Google Scholar