Posted by The Law School
15 November 2024Exeter Law School is delighted to announce it will be hosting a special event on 11 July 2025 to mark the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.
Professor Rebecca Probert will convene a special roundtable event organised in association with the journal Law and Humanities, and is now calling for papers to be presented at the event.
Writing after Jane’s death, Austen’s nephew (James Edward Austen-Leigh) claimed that she ‘was always very careful not to meddle with matters which she did not thoroughly understand’ and so ‘never touched upon politics, law or medicine’.
It’s the kind of patronizing assessment with which generations of women writers have had to contend. In fact, Austen’s novels constantly touch on legal issues relating to inheritance, property, marriage, and divorce, and lawyers feature regularly (if not always positively) among her cast of characters. She was clearly aware of how the profound inequalities of her world – in terms of class, gender, and race – were sustained by law. Her lightness of touch in alluding to such issues also raises interesting questions about what can be deduced about legal literacy at the time and what Austen’s contemporary readers would have taken from her legal allusions.
Professor Probert
If you would like to present a paper at this event, please send your title and abstract (up to 200
words) by Friday 21 February 2025 to Rebecca Probert (School of Law, University of Exeter;
convenor: R.J.Probert@exeter.ac.uk).
Please note that papers should take a humanities perspective on a legal issue or theme. Papers chosen for presentation will tend to be those that address a relevant law theme regarding the issues raised by Austen’s work.
The roundtable event will take place on 11 July 2025, at the University of Exeter, reflecting the
Devonshire setting of Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility.
See the full details in the attached PDF