In October, JASNA-NJ will take a look at some events and people who may have helped inspire facets of Mansfield Park by hosting a discussion of Paula Byrne’s biography of Dido Belle.
Please join us over Zoom on October 21st at 2pm EDT to share your thoughts on Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (also known as Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle.) You may click here to register.
Byrne is also the distinguished biographer of many other historical and literary figures, including Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.
According to Amazon:
The sensational true tale that inspired the major motion picture Belle starring Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Penelope Wilton, and Matthew Goode—a stunning story of the first mixed-race girl introduced to high society England and raised as a lady.
The illegitimate daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy and an enslaved African woman, Dido Belle was sent to live with her great-uncle, the Earl of Mansfield, one of the most powerful men of the time and a leading opponent of slavery. Growing up in his lavish estate, Dido was raised as a sister and companion to her white cousin, Elizabeth.
When a joint portrait of the girls, commissioned by Mansfield, was unveiled, eighteenth-century England was shocked to see a black woman and white woman depicted as equals. Inspired by the painting, Belle vividly brings to life this extraordinary woman caught between two worlds, and illuminates the great civil rights question of her age: the fight to end slavery.
Jane Austen Society of North America - New Jersey Region 