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Austen found

Fans of the author connect through new Vermont group

Kelly McDonald always has been a voracious reader. The Winooski woman appreciates the journey taken along a well-told story, as well as the craft, patience and care that go into stringing such words and ideas together, and making them something special.

And sometimes, something classic.

It was not until her days in college that McDonald found the reward of her reader's life: "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen.

Austen had slipped through McDonald's adolescence, at least not sticking with her like other high school literary rites of passage. But that time at the University of Vermont, Austen stuck.

McDonald found the ordinary thoughts and everyday schedules of Austen's characters a solace in the quick-paced world of the 21st century. She grew to adore Austen's writing and coveted each of Austen's six books.

"I find I can get lost in them," she says.

That appreciation then translated into a years-long international search, literally on foot across Great Britain and through Internet databases, for diaries and letters tied to Austen's nephew, a link in Austen's lineage that particularly captured McDonald's imagination.

Her willingness to go to such lengths for one author might seem singular in a person who isn't a professional scholar, but in fact it gives her plenty of company around the world - and in Vermont.

Now, thanks in part to McDonald, fellow Vermont-based fans of Austen have a way to find each other and share their devotion.

To feed her growing interest in Austen, who died in 1817 at age 41, McDonald recently became a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America - an offshoot of the original British incarnation, the Jane Austen Society.

JASNA, as the North American society is typically called, has approximately 3,500 members in 60 regional groups across the United States and Canada. "Its members, who are of all ages and from diverse walks of life, share an enjoyment of Austen's fiction and the company of like-minded readers," according to its Web site.

That connection has linked McDonald to some of the most scholarly minds on the globe who study Austen, her works and even the Napoleonic era in which the author lived.

"It has opened a new world up to me - one that has me thinking and looking at her work in different ways," she says.

Austen was a British writer known for conveying realism and social commentary. Scholars describe her as one of the most widely read and best-loved writers in British literature.

She lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry. Her books were "Sense and Sensibility" (published in 1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1815). She wrote two additional novels, "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion," both published in late 1817 after her death.

McDonald soon discovered she was not alone in Vermont in her admiration for Austen. After just a few phone calls and e-mails, she found fellow devotees, most of them women, across the Green Mountain State and in the rest of northern New England.

She began exploring the possibility of starting a JASNA chapter here and learned that she wasn't the first to have the same idea.

Deb Barnum, who has been an Austen reader for a good part of her life, tried eight years ago to start such a group here after a December tea she held to honor Austen's birthday (Dec. 16) at the bookstore Barnum owned then, Bygone Books in South Burlington. With very little publicity, more than 35 people showed up, filling the small independent bookstore to capacity.

"I couldn't believe it," Barnum recalls.

Then, a year later, when she scheduled a similar event and hosted it at a larger venue and brought in a guest speaker, a professor who teaches Austen at UVM, nearly 70 people showed up.

"It was a great day," Barnum says. "What it said to me was there was a lot of interest, more than I thought at the time."

Shortly after beginning the effort to form a regional chapter of the Austen society, Barnum slipped and fell, injuring herself to the point that both her personal and professional life suffered greatly.

Not being able to get the chapter off the ground was "one of the great losses for me" after the fall, she says. But she knew the interest still was out there.

Today, Barnum and McDonald are serving as co-regional coordinators for a Vermont chapter of the society.

So far, the Vermont group has "eight or nine" dues-paying members, the women say, including five lifetime members. They represent all corners of the state, from the Northeast Kingdom to the Champlain Valley to central Vermont to southern Vermont.

At the first informational meeting in November at Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, about 15 turned out. The next meeting is scheduled for March 30 and will feature a talk by Robyn Warhol-Down, a UVM professor of English, on "Jane Austen's Narrative Refusals." The event will be held at Champlain College's Hauke Conference Center from 2 to 4 p.m.

Clearly, Austen's appeal is widespread.

Barnum has been part of a hiking group in New Hampshire that regularly trekked up the White Mountains discussing Austen.

"The group of friends that used to meet at Pinkham Notch and now just meet in our various homes in New England are all, in fact, veteran hikers ... nothing like hiking up (Mount) Washington and then discussing Austen ... and turning a few heads at the huts. I know it seems incongruous, but I have found the most amazing mix of people that love Austen.

"She's always reread, and she's never gone out of print," says Barnum, an English major and former librarian who now runs Bygone Books as a Web-based bookseller.

Barnum says people who love Austen are never at a loss for things to talk about. In fact, at the annual four-day JASNA meetings over Columbus Day weekend (last year's was in Vancouver, British Columbia; this year's is in Chicago), hundreds of people attend - readers, fans, scholars and even a few fanatics who go all-out in period garb. At a meeting she recently attended in Boston, a speaker discussed the links between Austen and Vermeer's paintings.

Barnum says she is hoping to host at least three and maybe four meetings of the local Austen group a year, focusing not just on the author but on the time period in which she worked and other related topics - not all of them literary.

"This area is saturated with great speakers," Barnum says of the state. Middlebury College has experts on literature and the Napoleonic era, for example. There also are several experts at the Vermont Humanities Council.

Fans of Austen agree that her books have a little bit of everything: humor, sadness, universal human condition and romance. What most of Austen's books lack is melodrama. They are rooted in characters and describe, in detail, everyday life and thoughts of mostly female characters.

Barnum observes: "The characters grow from the beginning to end of the book. (Readers) either get caught up in it or wonder what it's all about. They get the feeling there's not a whole lot happening."

But that is precisely the draw. "(Austen offers) a quietness we all sort of lost" in the busyness of our 21st-century lives, Barnum says.

McDonald and Barnum both point to the growing popularity of Austen after several major motion pictures, biographies and television series that have come out since the 1990s. Many of those fans are younger women; there are male society members, but they are in the minority.

"It is a wonderful thing to have in common," McDonald says. "This is a way to appreciate and learn at the same time."

Contact Steven Pappas at steven.pappas@timesargus.com or at 223-3335.