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Aging with Austen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan S. Lanser
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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?

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

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