Dear friends and readers,
I am grateful to Nancy Mayer for alerting me to a use being made of a few places on my website where I posted studies and commentaries on Mansfield Park by the JASNA Atlanta region.
As you can see, the members of JASNA Atlanta are going to use my A Reading of Mansfield Park as jumping off places for their discussions.
These postings are what I wrote and sent to Austen-l when we read and discussed Mansfield Park a chapter each week sometime in 1997. Since then I found these speculative map to add to that study:
Nabokov’s mapping out of the grounds of Sotherton
Nabokov’s mapping of the disposition of rooms in Mansfield Park house
I concentrated on the use of letters in a number of them and put them in a separate section on epistolarity in Austen’s novels.
Francis O’Connor as a combination of Fanny Price and and the witty young Jane Austen narrator of Austen’s Juvenilia (Rozema’s 1999 MP)
My calendar (or timelines) for Mansfield Park are also recommended: I didn’t discover seasonal days as I did in Emma, but rather that Mansfield Park was written over a period of years and the calendar’s inconsistency suggests the section about the play-acting and the elopement of Henry and Maria were written as one long piece at a time different from the final copy.
And again after the original material I put on my blog: 2007 MP: Edmund (Blake Ritson) studying script, Tom (James D’Arcy) stalking off refusing to hear objections; all rehearsing, Fanny (Billie Piper) hard at work helping
Last my chronology of her writing life (quite different from LeFaye’s which is the one usually cited) is put before the members for consideration and talk.
All this is gratifying: when one works hard at a project, the real reward one looks for is that others find it genuinely useful, respect and like it.
I have made a reservation to stay in an inn near the ASECS (American Society for 18th century studies) in Williamsburg and attend their conference in a few weeks (for 3 days) and this has renewed my courage actually to go and enjoy myself.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Clare: “That’s good news, Ellen. You must be very pleased.”
It made me feel my work is valued and though the description of me was over-the-top and not so (can an adjunct be a “renowned scholar”? I ask that as a genuine question) I felt flattered. It may be that since my writing is meant to be available to all and is (no jargon), the organizers turned to it It’s there for free. It did make me feel odd that no one told me from the organization. I suppose people might read your book and never tell you since they don’t know you but this was advertised across a group of people. It seemed strange not to have been told.
Well, your work is valued by many. Your work with the various groups over the years and your book means that you do have a measure of fame in the literary field, especially amongst those of us interested in Auden, Trollope or the 18th century. I think, since I recently read that the majority of US academics are not tenured , that being an adjunct is irrelevant.
Clare
I’ve read 70% of all college teachers in the US are adjuncts, but my experience of adjuncts has shown me the major percentage are not scholars in the way I am; of those who are if they can afford it (have a spouse, usually husband) it’s common to become an independent scholar. One reason you don’t see those who are scholars and adjuncts (or not) or full-time contingent faculty (an intermediary full time position where however you make something like half or less of a tenured person, get a much poorer pension usually) is the money: they don’t have as much. The full-time contingents often teach 4 sections a term (a tenured person will teach 1 or 2! — with time off for their scholarship or committees much of which doesn’t take any where near the time of teaching) and they don’t go to conferences and often don’t publish because they’ve not got the time.
Yes, I read the same. It’s a disgrace, in my opinion. I think the adjuncts are being ripped off. It’s going the same way here, but the students don’t like it, nor the large classes and few tutorials.
Clare