Carol’s Canon

On a wintry weekend in 1991, I attended a meeting of Janeites at the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa. Janeites are Jane Austen enthusiasts; this was the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, when several hundred devotees of Austen assemble in a different city every year. They listen to readings, admire displays of quilts and artifacts, attend lectures by scholars, and assemble on the Saturday evening for a banquet and musical entertainment, many of them dressed in “Regency finery” or a facsimile thereof. I saw one woman with a crocheted doily on her head, others clutching shawls over patently homemade long dresses.

Carol Shields delivered a paper at this particular meeting, the theme of which was Austen’s novel Emma. Her paper was on body parts in the works of Austen, where there are neither fingers or toes:

Nor are there any hips, thighs, shins, buttocks, kidneys, intestines, wombs or navels �...