Going to Portland this weekend? Perhaps you should stop by and partake of the Jane Austen Conference. This year's theme? "Mystery, Mayhem, and Muslin."
The Los Angeles Times previews the event, here.
And, also, from a story in the Oregonian...
If you're a Jane Austen fanatic, also known as a Janeite, you don't have to guess because you're planning to attend a lecture called "Henry Tilney: Portrait of the Hero as Beta Male" at the Jane Austen Society of North America's annual meeting in Portland this week. You could also attend "Henry Tilney: Austen's Feminized Hero" or any of several discussions of muslin, the fabric that Henry can't stop talking about. You might even wear "a sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings" at the masked ball (they're calling it a "Bal Masqué") on Saturday night.
The Bal Masqué is a highlight of the weekend for the Janeites. There are dance workshops to prepare participants for the ins and outs of English country dance, and a stylist will be available to mold the ladies' hair into "updos" appropriate for the Regency period. Before the ball, those in costume will parade around the Hilton Portland in a "grande promenade" that will continue outside and around the block (weather permitting, of course).
It's all good fun, a point hammered home by the conference theme: "Jane Austen and the Abbey: Mystery, Mayhem, and Muslin in Portland." It's also serious fun, in more ways than one. More than 650 people are registered for the conference, the majority coming from out of state, and organizers are calling this the largest literary conference in Portland history. (Wordstock is a festival and isn't, by these standards, strictly literary.) Dozens of academics and scholars are presenting papers and discussing "Northanger Abbey," and not all of their scholarship concerns Henry Tilney's strange fondness for muslin. Shannon Campbell, a docent at the University of Alberta's Botanic Garden, will speak on "The Mystique of the Pineapple: A Lure for General Tilney."
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