Days later finally forcing myself to sit down and finish my narrative while I still remember something of the final day; Sunday mostly just consisted of getting home so I won't bother with it.



Saturday started with with everyone assembled again, this time for the essay contest winners to be presented and receive their medals, followed by another lecture. This one was about the use of noise in Mansfield Park, and it was a far better lecture than the one given for everyone the previous day. Here there was close text-reading, careful consideration of the characters, and consideration of the context and world the book takes place in without letting it dominate the lecture.

There were two breakout sessions in the morning. The first session I attended was to compare Henry and Mary Crawford to the characters of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, claiming Austen was influenced by the play in creating them. Unfortunately, the comparisons the speaker drew were very general, and not very convincing. For the second, I attended a lecture on two women high in the society of Nova Scotia in 1815 who were known to have read Mansfield Park shortly after she lost a very young child, and what they might have thought and felt. Which would be all very well, except the information on them was truly scarce; I suspect the two speakers chose their topic before discovering the lack of recorded information on it, and then didn't want to give their subject up.

For lunch, I led mom to the Italian place I'd had dinner Thursday, where we could both have pasta dishes. I went for the big dish of spagettini bolonaise again, if only because we would spend dinner at the banquet back at the hotel, and I wasn't about to assume any of the food served there would be edible; I can never stand the stuff hotels serve at these things. We got back with the first of the afternoon's two breakout sessions already underway, so while mom ran to one anyway, I went upstairs to rest for a bit before finally going downstairs for the final session.

This time I attended a lecture on clergy wives in Austen and during the Regency, and how well the various clergy wives and prospective clergy wives would have adapted to the role. The speaker was of the opinion that Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility was the most ideal clergy wife, Mrs. Elton from Emma would've been a better one had she been born a few decades later, and in relation to Mansfield Park, Mrs. Norris was nearly as good a clergy wife as she thought she was, Fanny Price would have had her challenges but in some ways would be well suited to be a clergy wife, and Mary Crawford was so unsuitable one wonders if she was perusing Edmund the way she was partly because she was getting older and worried about finding any husband at all. This was really the lecture I enjoyed the most.

Upstairs I discovered my key card was no longer working. I ended up waiting half an hour expecting my mother to return, then finally losing my patience and going downstairs to the lobby, where the problem was quickly fixed. Mom, who had met up unexpectedly with a friend, finally showed up about fifteen minutes before I would have had to go looking for her, and it turned out her key wouldn't work either! She too went to the lobby and got it fixed, but it left us both very unimpressed with the hotel.

For the evening, we donned the finery we'd worn to my sister's wedding last year, showed up at the cash bar long enough to have brief conversations with people before the doors opened for the banquet, where we were seated with the people involved in the essay contest. Mom and the two other professors at our table exchanged horror stories about some of the terrible things powerful people have been doing to the secondary education system in recent years, and we were served a four course meal, most of which I couldn't bring myself to even touch; the soup smelled so bad I ended up shrunk back against my chair. Dinner for me consisted of a roll and what pieces of main course turkey I could force myself to swallow.

There was a final lecture going on to those who didn't care for the promenade of costumes and the ball that followed the banquet, and my mom went to that. I went upstairs and watched some hockey, before heading back downstairs for the ball, where they had one guy introduce himself as Sir Thomas, and had another pair of people be presented as Fanny Price and Henry Crawford, so they could lead off the dancing. Unfortunately, the dances were fancier than usual, and without having a dance workshop beforehand I was hopelessly lost; it seemed impossible for me to even get where I was supposed to be in the dancing lines. I abandoned it very quickly, very briefly met with a friend of my mother's we hadn't gotten the chance to talk with earlier, then went up to bed, my JASNA meeting officially over. Mom managed to do some dancing after the lecture, but came upstairs about an hour later.

Whether we'll ever travel to another JASNA annual meeting is officially in question. We'll be going to the 2016 meeting, since that one's here in DC, but next year we are officially skipping.