Join us for the Harewood Jane Austen Book Club! Whether you're a first time Austen reader or coming back to her, come along for a relaxed conversation about Longbourn by Jo Barker.

This book club will be led by Chloe Wigston Smith, Professor of English and Director of the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.

We recommend that you have read Longbourn in advance so that you can get the most out of this informal and lively chat led by one of the curators of Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter.

Longbourn, 2013

An engrossing tale of loyalty, romance, poverty and dependence, Longbourn offers a completely fresh, ingeniously original angle to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice through the fascinating cast of servants in the Bennet household.

About Chloe Wigston Smith

Chloe Wigston Smith, Professor of English and Director of the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, is a specialist in women’s writing, material culture, and the history of fashion in the eighteenth century.

She has written and edited several books, including Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel(Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Novels, Needlework, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2024).