A Celebration of Jane Austen: Jennifer Egan, Kevin Kwan, Helen Fielding, Vivian Gornick, Alexandra Schwartz, Emily Mortimer, and Alessandro Nivola

With a new addition: special readings from actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola

Join a group of celebrated writers and critics — including Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, bestselling novelist Kevin Kwan, Helen Fielding, acclaimed memoirist Vivian Gornick, and The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, and actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola — for a reading and conversation about Jane Austen, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of her birth.

“What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as [she] saw it without shrinking,” writes Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, of Jane Austen. More than anything, Austen wrote with wit, elegance, and extraordinary emotional truthfulness about the lives of women; their friendships, their desires, and their complex inner worlds. Her novels — Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and others — are “as nearly flawless as any fiction could be” (Eudora Welty), her characters vivid, complex, and alive, spawning countless adaptations and incalculable influence on popular and literary culture in the centuries after her death.

In a special reading and conversation on the 250th anniversary of her birth, hear a group of extraordinary contemporary writers on Austen’s legacy — how she has remained in the cultural bloodstream for so long, her influence on their own work, and much more.