Tea, polite company and appreciation for Austen
By Bailey LeFeverCorrespondent
Feb 7, 2019 at 6:27 PM Feb 7, 2019 at 6:32 PM
The meetings provide a community for the Austen-obsessed and the skeptical. The only instructions: "We encourage you to bring a teacup and a snack to share. Hot water and tea bags provided."
Fanny Price is most definitely not a ninny.
Views of Price's "Mansfield Park" character, though one of Jane Austen's least popular heroines, skew mostly positive in the minds of the eight gathered for the every-other-month meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North Florida on a recent Saturday.
But it's up for debate, and that's precisely what this group is here for.
"No one incites feelings quite like Fanny," said Rich Mellman, the group's leader.
Austen, the English novelist, is one of the most enduring writers of the 18th century.
They meet six times a year, usually tucked into a periwinkle room provided by the Millhopper Branch Library. Their discussions are typically unstructured and lively, said Mellman, a retired lawyer.
This meeting is full of new faces, the age gap easily 30 years, from retirees to a singular college student. Members unpack beloved, foiled teacups from lunch boxes and cordially wait until each viewpoint is covered before moving on to the next topic.
Mellman tells the long-returning members to wait to share their opinions, "I'd like to have people who aren't on the record go first. So they don't feel more put upon by the vocal members of the group."
One of these new members is Sharlene Magnarella. She discovered the meeting through a flyer at the library, hoping to delve into a singular author with greater depth.
Magnarella takes her tea in a white-and-blue teacup that was a gift from her daughter's study abroad trip to England. She brought the cup to the meeting as an ode to Jane's home country.
"I thought it was the most authentic experience I could get," she said.
The North Florida chapter recently gained a new leader in Mellman, his love of Jane "unrequited." But many of the members have been attending for quite a while.
Two of the biggest players in the discussion are Rissi Cherie and Michael Woodward, an interior designer and lawyer, respectively. The pair have attended the gatherings for seven or eight years, by Michael's estimation. Ten by Rissi's.
Rissi's favorite memory was the society's inaugural Box Hill Picnic last March, a celebration dreamt up by Austen in "Emma." However, she holds more dearly the time spent in passionate debate around the square of fold-up tables.
"I think there's a lot of joy at our meetings."
One of the most powerful bits of discussion at the January meeting delves into Fanny's moral code. Jeanne Petullo, a member who drives up from The Villages to attend, argues that Fanny could not depend on her wealth or wit to advance her position in life.
"What would be her anchor if she did not have her moral code?"
Petullo argues that Fanny had to look inward to solve her own problems and retain her good standing, at the cost of seeming a bit prissy or too "goody goody."
Price's character brings topics like feminism and Austen's (or "Jane" as they call her) opinion on slavery into the conversation, her commentary revolutionary at a time when it was socially unacceptable. This is her strength, Cherie said.
"Jane keeps pointing out the condition of women," Cherie said. "She was quite enlightened."
Cherie's favorite Austen novels are "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice." She notes her favorite scenes as those when the heroine defends herself or shares some piece of her soul with another character.
"We have to learn to process what's going on around us and in ourselves," Cherie said.
Her husband, Woodward, originally reintroduced Cherie to the author some 20 years ago.
"He was so immersed in it that he had a lot to explain about it," Cherie said.
The obsession began in his 20s, as he read new authors, but each failed to provide a worthy competition to Austen's prose, he said.
"There was a time when I was mainlining Jane every day," Woodward admits.
The pair then decided to attend the meetings to broaden their mutual perspective on Austen's meaning, Woodward said.
"I had to find other people that got this stuff," he said. "So that I could have some community with other people that were seeing the depth to Jane Austen's writing and the skill and the brilliance of it."
Woodward appreciates how the club welcomes a variety of interest levels into "it's big tent" from those who have only seen the movies to academics.
"I was only half-kidding when I referred to it (the Jane Austen Society) as a support group."
Woodward said he appreciates how Austen places characters in everyday situations that test their character, revealing more to the reader about the human condition than extraordinary circumstances they will never encounter.
"She gets into what it takes to make oneself a complete human being," he said.
On Austen's relevance, hundreds of years later, he said: "People haven't changed that much."