JASP 2025: Interview with Jennie Batchelor
- Delicia Johnson
- Apr 11
- 5 min read
Updated: May 2
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 will 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. Our Regency Ball is also not an event to be missed! We can’t wait to celebrate Austen’s 250th birthday with you!
Our next interviewee is Jennie Batchelor, an academic, author, and speaker. She has written and edited books on various topics including women's writing, eighteenth century dress, and early women's magazines. Jennie is particularly known in Austen circles as the co-author of Jane Austen Embroidery, which contains fifteen embroidery projects from Austen's era. She has also given public talks on the aforementioned subjects. Jennie curated the public engagement project, 'The Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off', in which people around the world recreated rare, surviving embroidery patterns from the Lady's Magazine for an exhibition to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Emma. She has given two talks for Jane Austen & Co: 'Crafting With Jane Austen' and 'Jane Austen and the Magazines'. Along with her devotion to public humanities, Jennie is Head of Department and Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies at the University of York.
At JASP 2025 Jennie will lead two embroidery workshops: "Stich a sprigged pocket handkerchief" and "Stich the Perfect Regency Pincushion". Both workshops will use patterns that Jennie has adapted from issues of The Lady's Magazine. She will also give a lecture titled, "'Much use and more beauty': Transatlantic Domestic Arts in the Era of Jane Austen".
How long have you been involved in JASP?
I have given two online talks for JASP since 2020. I am a speaker at this year's event.
Which JASP activity are you most looking forward to and why?
I am looking forward to all of it, but particularly to the embroidery workshops I will be running alongside my talk.
What is your lecture about?
My lecture is called '"Much use and more beauty': Transatlantic Domestic Arts' in the Era of Jane Austen'. In this illustrated talk, I will use Austen's novels as a way of opening up the wide range of domestic handcrafts women, including Jane Austen, practiced in the transatlantic world and how their work in the home allowed them to engage with the world beyond.
Why do you think Austen's Sense and Sensibility is important not only to her body of work but the entire literary canon? Why do you believe people should read it?
Sense and Sensibility is Austen's first published novel, of course, and it launched onto the literary stage. Like some other of her novels, it had a long gestation. It was begun in the politically turbulent 1790s as a novel written as a series of letters. By the time it was published in 1811, its form and the world around it (though in some ways no less turbulent) were changed. Among its many virtues, then, Sense and Sensibility is a novel that shows us Jane Austen as a evolving writer honing her craft. It is a novel that fascinatingly retains some of the characteristics of the decade in which it began life: especially in the energetic, idealistic Marianne and in its dark subplot of the fallen woman in the story of Colonel Brandon's sister-in-law, Eliza. And even though Jane Austen moved away from the epistolary (novel as a series of letters) form when she redrafted the novel, letters play a hugely significant role in Sense and Sensibility as they do in other of her works. Austen's first published fiction is also a wonderfully captivating read, characterized by wit, economy of prose and, in Elinor, an extraordinarily keen sense of psychic and emotional costs of trying to live as we think we ought or are expected to.
What do you enjoy most about Sense and Sensibility?
I could talk at length about this, but I might save that for JASP! I adore Marianne and still feel the same way I did when I first read her story when I was 13 years old. It is a travesty that she has to change and marry a flannel waistcoat. (Alan Rickman was brilliant as Colonel Brandon, but Colonel Brandon is NOT Alan Rickman!) I think Lucy Steele is rather misunderstood. And I cannot bear Edward Ferrars.
What do you love about Jane Austen and her works?
Jane Austen wrote great plots and characters. She wrote with a unique wit, economy and perspective that allows you to be in the minds of characters, to care about them deeply, and to retain amused or critical distance all at the same time. They demand re-reading. And every time you read them, you find in them something different. They become more comforting and familiar and more brilliant and disconcerting in every read. My students often start every course I have ever taught on Jane Austen liking or loving her, but thinking that all her novels are variations on themes. They almost all end them realizing how innovative and distinct each one is. I agree with my students!
Why is Jane Austen important?
Jane Austen was a voracious reader, a brilliant and technically innovative writer and arguably the most eloquent champion of the novel the genre has ever had.
Why should people attend JASP 2025?
To be part of a global and inclusive community of Jane Austen fans and critics.
Outside of your work with JASP do you have any other Jane Austen-related projects or contributions?
I have been reading Jane Austen since I was 10 after falling in love with her wit and work via the MGM Pride and Prejudice with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. Fast forward 16 years and my first job, post-PhD was as a postdoctoral fellowship at Chawton House Library, the 'Great House' that was one of three estates owned by her brother, Edward Austen Knight. I regularly give talks on Jane Austen and have written several articles and book chapters about her work and world, including the popular history-craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (Dover, 2020). I was Patron of the Jane Austen Society Kent Branch until 2024 (when I relocated to the north of England) and am currently co-curator of the major exhibition Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter at Harewood House, UK, from May to October 2025.
You can learn more about Jennie and her incredible work within the Jane Austen community by visiting her website.
A few places are still available for JASP 2025. Register here! JASP 2025 is partially supported by a grant from North Carolina Humanities. We hope to see you in New Bern, NC! Please celebrate Austen 250th birthday with us
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