92NY To Present a Celebration of Jane Austen Next Thursday

92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center will present a celebration of beloved author Jane Austen on Thursday, March 27, with a dramatic reading, and a conversation about Austen's iconic novels, her life, and her enduring legacy.

The event, presented on the occasion of Jane Austen's 250th birth year, will begin with a reading by actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola; it will be followed by a conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan and Bridget Jones' Diary author Helen Fielding, as well as author Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians, among others), literary critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick, and The New Yorker's  Alexandra Schwartz. The panelists will touch on how Jane Austen has remained in the cultural bloodstream for so long, Austen's influence on their own work, and much more.

“What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as [she] saw it without shrinking,” wrote Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, of Jane Austen.

“More than anything, Austen wrote with wit, elegance, and extraordinary emotional truthfulness about the lives of women; their friendships, their desires, and their complex inner worlds," said Lucas Wittmann, Executive Director of 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center. "Her novels — Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion , and others — are ‘as nearly flawless as any fiction could be' (Eudora Welty)—her characters vivid, complex, and alive, spawning countless adaptations and incalculable influence on popular and literary culture in the centuries after her death.”

Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817; she spent most of her life in four towns in England - the Hampshire village of Steventon, Bath, Southampton and Chawton. Most of her six completed, now-iconic novels — Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey — have been adapted for the stage and screen. Austen completed twelve chapters of a novel Sanditon, but it remains an unfinished work.