The next JASA Brisbane meeting will be held on Saturday 31 October 2026 at 1pm at our usual venue, St Columb’s, 23 Victoria Street, Clayfield.

Our guest speaker is Judith Stove with the talk A Century of ‘A Room of One’s Own’: Woolf and Austen, Women and Fiction. Virginia Woolf is usually described as a ‘modernist’ writer, one who re-shaped the form of the English novel. But how much was she responding to the tradition – by then over a century old – of English fiction by women? Her classic lectures, eventually published as ‘A Room of One’s Own’, alongside her critical essays, reveal Woolf as engaging with this inheritance – particularly with the style, creations, and innovations of her great foremother, Jane Austen.

Judith Stove is a writer based in Sydney, who has contributed over years to events and publications of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. Judith has published two books on the life and works of Austen, ‘The Missing Monument Murders’ (2016) and ‘Jane Austen's Inspiration: Beloved Friend Anne Lefroy (2019)’. She co-hosts the 'Soul Searching with Seneca' fortnightly podcast at The Walled Garden [TWG] on Roman writer Seneca's Letters, exploring both their philosophical ideas and Seneca's sublime use of Latin.