Booking and details
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Dates Tue, Dec 9, 2025 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
This year, our annual birthday tribute to American poet Emily Dickinson will also honor English novelist Jane Austen on her 250th birthday.
Noted scholars Martha Nell Smith and Patricia A. Matthew will discuss the life, work, and legacy of Dickinson and Austen and how they continue to shape writers of today, highlighting well-known passages.
The reading, which is co-sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum, will be followed by a book signing in the Great Hall. Emily Dickinson’s famous black cake, based on her own recipe, will also be served.
Virtual access
Can’t join us in person? Purchase virtual access to a live streaming of the reading.
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted to attend this event.
Related interview
Hear from Patricia A. Matthew on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast.
Reading Jane Austen in the 21st Century
250 years after her birth, Jane Austen’s appeal endures. Scholar Patricia A. Matthew discusses editing three Austen novels and how new research on Caribbean sugar plantations expands our view of the Regency era.
About the speakers
Patricia A. Matthew
Patricia A. Matthew is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches courses on the History of the Novel and Romantic abolitionist culture. She writes about Regency-era literature and culture for scholars and the public in journals and publications including Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Women’s Writing, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. She co-edits the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. She is also director of the Race and Regency Lab and editor of Penguin Random House’s 250th anniversary editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. Winner of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the British Association for Romanticism Studies, she is currently writing a book about abolition, material culture, and gender for Princeton University Press. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Martha Nell Smith
Martha Nell Smith is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH http://www.mith.umd.edu) at the University of Maryland.