A Dance with Jane Austen: How a Novelist and her Characters Went to the Ball

by Susannah Fullerton and Deirdre Le Faye

Deirdre Le Faye (Foreword)

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Book cover for A Dance with Jane Austen

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Jane Austen loved to put on her satin slippers with shoe-roses, her white gloves and muslin gown, and go off for an evening of fun at the Basingstoke assemblies. The Bennet girls share their creator's delight and go off joyfully to dance, and of course to meet future husbands.

Drawing on contemporary accounts and illustrations, and a close reading of the novels as well as Austen's correspondence, Susannah Fullerton takes the reader through all the stages of a Regency Ball as Jane Austen and her characters would have known it.

Her subjects learn their steps, dress in readiness, find transport to convey them to a ball, choose between public and private balls, worry over a shortage of men, prefer a cotillion to a quadrille, talk and flirt with their partners, sustain themselves with supper, fall in love, and then go home to talk it all over at the end.

  • ISBN13 9780711232457
  • Publish Date 4 October 2012
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 30 May 2017
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint Frances Lincoln
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 160
  • Language English