Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Clive interviews Jane Austen scholar.
« : 21.04.07 at 21:35 » |
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The American-based news and cultural programming broadcaster NPR (National Public Radio) had short interview with Clive dealing with the question of whether or not the portrait that was purported to be of the young Jane Austen and which went under the hammer (and failed to find one bidder) at Christie's auction house yesterday was authentic or not. He, with good reason, believed not.
In the course of in the audio version of the interview, and by way of adding weight to his argument, he revealed that he’d just interviewed the world’s “leading scholar on Jane Austen” (for Talking in the Library, I presume) and that she was not convinced either.
Anybody who likes Austen, as I do, will be certainly be looking forward to the day that interview first pops up on either Clive's own website or the Slate website. I’m hazarding a guess here that that the interviewee is none other than Deirdre Le Faye. I could of course be wrong, but I do think that Deirdre has spent enough of her career researching, and writing about, Jane Austen to be considered a 'leading' Austen scholar. She is, one hopes, also someone who is more than be qualified to put a good case, and one which I feel certain Clive will encourage, for our actually getting to know Austin’s work through reading it rather than through watching TV adaptations of it.
Kevin Cryan
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