Event Start Date: 27 June 2025

Location: Peek Chapel, Lyme Regis

We are very pleased to announce a very special event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, as we visit the beautiful Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast – a setting used famously by Austen in Persuasion.  

Somerville English Fellow Fiona Stafford is a world expert on Austen and her work, and the ideal speaker for our visit to the beautiful, 19th century Peek Chapel.  An editor of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, and the author of Jane Austen: A Brief Life (2017), Fiona’s talk, for Somervillians and their guests, is entitled “‘I must get him some books’: Jane Austen in Lyme”.  We are delighted also to welcome Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, President of the Jane Austen Society, to introduce the evening.

We would like to welcome to this very special event local alumni from the south-west, and anyone else who would like a summer weekend in Lyme!  The evening will begin at 6.30pm, and drinks and nibbles will follow the talk. 

Booking is now closed – if you would like to be put on a waiting list please let us know.

This is one of two events the College will hold celebrating the long-standing connection between Somerville and Jane Austen scholarship.  More information to follow about a study day at Somerville in the next academic year.

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