“To be fond of dancing,” Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice, “was a certain step towards falling in love.” Too bad, other than being told so, we never see it in Austen’s novels. In each of Jane Austen’s novels, an assembly dance or formal ball is planned and discussed and sometimes discussed through character dialogue—but never adequately described, or rendered graphically according to the moving bodies or social contexts in which these merry meetings take place in Regency England. Fortunately, we have Austenmania and the rush of popular films based on Austen’s novels—at least since 1995—to show us the steps and motions of the dances, together with the attire, hairstyles, glances, and social significance of dance, as deeply meaningful courtship ritual and social performance.
About the presenterWendy Peterson
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