It's that time of year...

It’s that time of year to don one’s best bonnet and go gallivanting again to Regency events and the ever so delightful balls and assemblies. Some friends and I will be dancing at the Alton Ball tomorrow, and those of us who have more love of Austen than sense [putting my hand up ;) ] simply can’t wait to get there.

             

If my scheduled post were next week, I could have brought new photos, but as it’s today I had to look for photos from previous years in Alton and Chawton.

The lure of Chawton is ever so great for those of us who revere Jane Austen and the legacy she left us. 

The beautiful cottage whence her genius was released into the world...

...the Great House with its tranquil beauty...

...the whole village and its picture-perfect cottages...

...and the surrounding countryside with the English verdure she writes about with so much affection in ‘Emma’. 

We can easily imagine Jane Austen walking the very same woodland paths – I think that, like Elizabeth Bennet, she enjoyed a good long ramble, and might well have returned home on more than one occasion with her skirts six inches deep in mud.

As always, I wonder what she would say were she to somehow learn of the amazing following she and her work still have, two centuries on; were she to see the crowds gathering in Alton in their finery to honour the Regency period, largely because of her. I think she would be surprised, hopefully gratified, but greatly entertained as well. Much like Elizabeth Bennet, I think she, too, dearly loved a laugh.

There will be laughter aplenty ‘on the morrow’, and dancing and good cheer, and hopefully we would continue to meet in years to come, to play dress-up (odd as non-Janeites think us :) ) and flutter our fans, dance and party like it’s 1799.