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THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA WAS FOUNDED in 1979 to provide a haven in North America for lovers of Jane Austen who might never be able to travel to Chawton, England. The inaugural meeting was held on October 5 with a dinner attended by one hundred members at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City.
But JASNA's story actually begins four years earlier, in July 1975, when two of the Society's founders met for the first time in Hampshire, England, while attending events marking the bicentennial of Jane Austen's birth. Joan Austen-Leigh of Victoria, British Columbia, was a novelist, a playwright, and a great-great-grandniece of Jane Austen. J. David (Jack) Grey was a vice principal at a junior high school in New York City, a Jane Austen collector, and later coeditor of The Jane Austen Companion. It was Joan Austen-Leigh's husband, Denis Mason Hurley, who suggested they form a North American Society and kept the idea alive for the next four years amid concerns about the geographic distance and the stress involved in organizing a Society. Denis kept prodding, and in early 1979, Jack wrote to Sir Hugh Smiley and asked for a list of North American members of the English Jane Austen Society.
Joan and Jack invited Henry Burke to join them as the third founder of JASNA. Henry was a Baltimore accountant and attorney whose late wife, Alberta, had amassed one of the finest private collections of Austen letters, books, and ephemera in the world. He performed the legal work necessary to create the Jane Austen Society of North America.
In January 1979, Jack Grey sent letters to distinguished scholars of English literature, asking if they...