Launch Event: Jane Austen at GHT

Event, Exhibitions, Free, In Person, Performance, Talks

Friday 15th November 2024 6:00pm - 9:00pm

God's House Tower, Town Quay Road, Southampton, SO14 2NY

Join us at God’s House Tower on Friday 15th November for a special night launching two exhibitions, celebrating the wit, wisdom, life and legacy of Jane Austen on the 250th anniversary of her birth.

In Training for a Heroine: Jane Austen’s Travelling Writing Desk 

Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk was gifted to the author around the time of her 19th birthday by her farther, George Austen. The portable, mahogany desk was designed to fold into a case for ease of traveling and has a secret draw where Austen stored her most treasured possessions – her letters and manuscripts.

In Training for a Heroine tells the story Jane Austen as a young, ambitious writer at the  beginning of her career, the travelling writing desk symbolising a world of opportunity and possibility. Extracts from Austen’s letters provide us with an insight into her life and her time in Southampton where she lived briefly in 1783 and from 1806-1809.

Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk, on loan from the British Library, is at the heart of a year-long celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in Southampton, and across the world.

No Notion of Loving by Halves by Jocelyn McGregor

Commissioned by ‘a space’ arts, No Notion of Loving by Halves by Jocelyn McGregor is a site-specific multi-media installation and programme of live performances that take a deep dive into Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and explore the intriguing and intense relationships the heroine, Catherine, develops with other female characters in the novel.

These relationships often lurch from familial and supportive to conspiratorial; from formal and funny to distant and heated; and can be ragingly competitive, passionate in both love and hate. They are complex, nuanced and fundamentally Gothic.

No Notion of Loving by Halves is a contemporary exploration of how these fictional relationships reflect Austen’s reality, the relationships developed between Gothic women authors through their works of fiction and how much these relationships still resonate in the work of many artists and authors today.