Festival Jane Austen, Australie, 2011
Two hundred years ago was the first time Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility“ was published. For the past 4 years, an offshoot of the famous Jane Austen Festival in Bath (England) has been held in April in Canberra, the Australian capital. This year was no exception, and more than a hundred persons gathered to live as they could have in her days: they dress up, attend balls and dinners and go on walks in St John’s Church’s gardens, …
Every year, the organizers of the festival choose one of Jane Austen’s books as the theme of the weekend. This year, it was “Northanger Abbey”, her first novel (though the last to be published, after she died), where the heroine plunges herself in gothic novels and cannot distinguish reality from fiction. More than only admirers of Jane Austen, the Festival attracts history and costumes fans, dancers, musicians, … Most of the attendants come in costume and feel transformed by the atmosphere of the Festival; when you enter it, you immediately are under the impression that you have just jumped two hundred years… into the past.
Text by Linda Morris
Jane Austen Festival
Portrait typique de la Régence
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