Aging with Austen

In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings sin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 2018-05, Vol.133 (3), p.654-660
Main Author: Lanser, Susan S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aging
Annual meetings
Feminism
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings since 1975, as my hastily consulted curriculum vitae proclaimed? hough rhetorical, the questions prompted a nostalgic encounter with a few nearly forgotten conference talks and a deeper contemplation of the person who delivered them. (How) had my reading and writing altered across the decades in which I moved from graduate student through the tenure ranks to professor emerita? What had it meant to age as a reader? Or, for the purposes of this short meditation, what had it meant to age as a reader of Jane Austen, whose presence threads through my teaching and writing from beginning to not-yet end?
ISSN:0030-8129
1938-1530
DOI:10.1632/pmla.2018.133.3.654