DMU researchers help world celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth

Academics from De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) will have a major role to play when the world marks the 250^th anniversary of the birth of beloved author Jane Austen next year.

Thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant, English Literature and Adaptations experts from DMU, in association with the University of Nottingham, will be contributing materials to a major exhibition in 2025 at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire, which attracts visitors from around the globe.

A portrait of Jane Austen whose 250th anniversary is in 2025

The researchers will also use DMU’s expertise in digital humanities applications to create classroom resources for classic Jane Austen texts Pride and Prejudice – which is on the GCSE syllabus - and Northanger Abbey – which is taught at A-level.

The exhibition and the teaching materials will draw on prized DMU archives from award-winning TV scriptwriter Andrew Davies and producer Sue Birtwistle, who worked together on the BBC’s famous adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995).

The archives, held in DMU’s Special Collections, are also home to five different draft screenplays from Andrew Davies’ work on ITV’s production of Northanger Abbey (2007), which offer fascinating insights into the art of script development and the adaptation process.

This new award is follow-on funding for impact and engagement, building on an earlier AHRC project by the same team, that created an interactive website showing in detail how George Eliot’s classic novel, Middlemarch, was adapted by Andrew Davies, as a 6-part BBC serial in 1994.

Believed to be the first of its kind, the ‘genetic edition’ of Middlemarch - which can be seen here - takes the reader on a journey from the source novel to the final production through layers of scripts, correspondence, interviews, photographs and audio and video clips.

The new project adapts the methods of digital textual encoding applied to Middlemarch to produce educational resources from Jane Austen adaptations, using these celebrated screen versions as pathways to the imaginative worlds of the literary sources.

Jane Austen's home in Chawton, Hampshire, is now a museum

DMU’s Professor Justin Smith, Director of the Research and Innovation Institute for Arts, Design and Performance, said: “We relish this opportunity to build on the research that we have done and translate it into educational and exhibition materials for use in schools and for visitors to heritage sites like Jane Austen’s House.

“It brings our research to new audiences in a way that sheds new light on the original books. Getting our research into the public domain is always our ambition.”

The team involved in the latest project are Professor Smith, Emeritus Professor Deborah Cartmell – author of several books on Jane Austen adaptations and editor of the journal Adaptation – Professor Gabriel Egan, who leads DMU’s Centre for Textual Studies, and post-doctoral research fellow Dr Lucy Hobbs, who also works in educational publishing. As before, the partner co-investigator is Dr Anna Blackwell of the University of Nottingham.

Alongside Jane Austen’s House, the project’s other key stakeholders are the Educational Recording Agency (ERA), who license BBC classic adaptations for use in schools and colleges, and the English Association.