JASP 2025: Interview with Anna Neill

In anticipation of JASP 2025 we’ll be interviewing our esteemed staff and speakers. This year’s four-day symposium, JASP 2025: Sensibility and Domesticity, will take place June 19-22, 2025, in historic New Bern, North Carolina. We'll be focusing on Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and considering the birth of her career as a published author and taking a transatlantic look at the world into which she was born. Program topics include medicine, birth, and domestic arts in Regency England and colonial North Carolina. We’ll be covering the aforementioned topics and celebrating Austen’s 250th birthday through a wide range of activities including workshops, small-group discussions, and workshops. And of course, our Regency Ball is an event not to be missed!

Our next interviewee is with JASP 2025 speaker, Anna Neil. Her presentation is titled 'To Knit Bone and Home: How Women's Household Books Shaped Communities in the Regency Era'. Anna is a librarian and historian whose research focuses on domestic arts and women's social movements. She volunteers and interprets 18th and early 19th century cooking and sewing at North Carolina State Historic Sites.

250th anniversary of the Edenton Tea Party, one of the earliest organized women's political actions in US history

Will this be your first time attending JASP? 

No, but this is my first time presenting!

Anna and her husband at the 2023 JASP ball. He is wearing a reproduction uniform from 4th King's Own regiment and portrays a fifer (musician). 

Are there any JASP 2025 activities you’re most looking forward to? 

I am looking forward to the social times, like Elevenses, the ball, or small breakout sessions, to meet and make new friends.

Can you tell us a bit about your presentation?

My presentation is titled 'To Knit Bone and Home: How Women's Household Books Shaped Communities in the Regency Era'. We will learn how two radically different women from England and the colony of North Carolina practiced and recorded the same traditions of healing culture for their families and communities. Martha Lloyd Austen, an Anglican and member of the gentry, and Rachel Stout Allen, a Quaker midwife in the backcountry, saved written remedies and recipes that survived across the centuries. We will look at the importance of such household books in domestic life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the light of swiftly changing medical sciences and women's social engagement within their communities.

What do you hope attendees gain from your presentation?

I volunteer as a historical interpreter at Alamance Battleground, where the 1780 Allen family cabin is preserved. I have spent many days immersed in their material daily life over the last seven years. When the 2025 topic of JASP was announced, I knew right away that the lives & writings of Rachel Stout Allen and Martha Lloyd Austen would make an excellent topical bridge between the two coasts of England and North Carolina. I am always eager to bring more attention to the quiet aspects of domestic history and how that shaped the larger world in which we study major events.

Image of the Allen family's cabin.

What I hope attendees will gain from my lecture is this: the recorded details of their lives are vitally important and their written words may teach the future in ways we cannot grasp now. Your recipes, your shopping lists, even your little journal entries talking about the bad weather and your allergies, are endlessly fascinating when viewed from the historian's lens. Women's history is shaped by those who write it down; we need as many voices as possible to ensure future generations can learn about our joys, accomplishments, and struggles.

Do you have a favorite character in Sense and Sensibility? 

The older I grow, the more I value Mrs. Jennings' good nature and intentions towards the young ladies in her circle. Modern dating apps are a quagmire and maybe a little matchmaking might work better? Certainly a kind older woman with bon-bons and olives would help with breakups, too! As an introvert, I appreciate small doses of gregarious people who organize social occasions, like the Middletons. I fear, though, they do not like small doses of company; I empathize with Elinor and Marianne's plight of never being able to escape their invitations.

Film still from Sense and Sensibility (1995)

What do you love about Jane Austen?

What I love the most about Jane was her ability to create memorable characters in her stories, even down to the smaller supporting roles. I have never felt like she used too much detail in describing characters; every little bit helped her plot lines. She must have analyzed the people in her life like a modern psychologist! I believe those character details made them universally relatable across time, space, and cultures.

Why should people attend JASP?

The Jane Austen Summer Program is the best mixture of serious learning and conviviality of fellow literary nerds you will ever experience. You can bring your full, authentic self to the event and be met with equal enthusiasm from all the attendees and speakers alike. I especially enjoy the variety of activities offered that one can choose to dance, learn card games, embroider, act in a play, or simply savor the delights of people watching. What better way to honor the life of Jane Austen than to share in all the varied activities together!

---

Your donations support all of our programming for the annual Jane Austen Summer Program and Jane Austen & Co. They also help with our community efforts, including student writing contests and continuing education for high school teachers, through scholarships to JASP and our new initiative JASP+. Contributing to this fund will help us keep our costs and the ticket prices as low as possible. It will also help ensure that JASP continues to exist in future years.

Donate Here

JASP 2025 is partially supported by a grant from NC Humanities.