"The Talk in Jane Austen." Conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), Jasper, Alberta, 14-16 May 1999 (review)

REVIEWS 125 inventa dans la lettre à sa fille Angélique lors du mariage de cette dernière est un des facteurs principaux qui pousse Diderot à développer dans le Supplément une société imaginaire où de telles répressions n'existent pas. La deuxième impulsion qui suscita une suite de prises de position contraires provient de l'œuvre ellem ême. Cette deuxième source est minutieusement analysée par Rex qui en relève les moments pertinents. Ainsi, la prise de position initiale (Bougainville est envisagé de façon favorable) fait place à un mouvement contraire: une forte dénonciation de Bougainville, de son expédition etdes valeurs civilisées qu'il représente, par un vieillard tahitien qui voit ses compatriotes condamnés à être esclaves et à être décimés par les Européens. Ce discours, imbu d'émotion, amène Diderot à inventer une vision contraire, énoncée par Orou qui, à travers une démonstration rationnelle et philosophique, prétend que les Tahitiens, loin d'être condamnés, découvrentchez les Européens des alliés qui leur permettront de prospérer et de devenir forts. Selon Rex, le vrai génie de cette œuvre réside dans la façon dont Diderot explore et élucide les aspects variés d'un problème en l'examinant par son contraire. Jane Rush Université McMaster "The Talk in Jane Austen." Conference ofthe Jane Austen Society ofNorth America (JASNA), Jasper, Alberta, 14-16 May 1999. The super-regional conference of The Jane Austen Society of North America, organized by co-convenors Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel, of the University of Alberta, and Lynn Weinlos Gregg of the Edmonton Austen Society, with the indispensable help of members of the Edmonton Austen Society and graduate students from the university, was a three-day pleasure to attend. The speakers' list contained so many names well known in Austen scholarship that it was a difficult conference to resist—Claire Tomalin, Gary Kelly, Jocelyn Harris, Jan Fergus, Isobel Grundy, in addition to Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel. Other scholars less familiar to JASNA audiences, from the United States, from South Africa, and from the United Kingdom, together with a sprinkling of graduate students, also with the Austen passion, contributed to the program. The topic of the conference, "The Talk in Jane Austen," joined speakers and members of JASNA in the task of distinguishing between our talk and her talk. This permeable barrier continues to be an interesting issue at JASNA conferences, where the meaning of "our author" remains a lively point. The size of the conference seemed about right for such a conversation: eighty participants, two-thirds of them lay readers, the rest academics, holed up at a luxurious Canadian lodge to engage in talk of "talk." In general, the issues under discussion seemed to fall into three overlapping areas: Austen's subversion of contemporary stereotypes of talking women; the task of establishing intimacy within the rules of contemporary conversation; and power relations in conversation. 126 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 Claire Tomalin began the conference with recollections of patterns of talk in the novels and letters that returned to haunt her after her recent biography of Austen was published—notes in her research findings on things said and left unsaid about "ruthlessly deprived gentlewomen." Some of these women simply disappear from the record when they become irredeemably poor. Others hover like ghosts. Mme Bigeon, for example, the housekeeper for Austen's brother Henry, who lost her small fortune in the failure of Henry's bank, shows up in Austen's will with a legacy of fifty pounds (she left Henry an equal fifty). Then there is Mrs Stent, an Austen neighbour, known only for her silly talk, but a cautionary figure for Austen: "In time we may come to be Mrs Stents ourselves." Or there is Miss Benn, living nearby in very poor lodgings, whom Austen invites to Chawton Cottage for the first reading aloud of the newly published Pride and Prejudice. And there is Anne Sharpe, the most important ofAusten's impecunious single women friends, the governess to Austen's rich brother Edward's children— important enough that Austen kept up a correspondence...