The London Review of Books and the City of London Sinfonia join forces to pose the question nobody thought to ask during Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary year, through a piquant programme of readings and music inspired by one of the magazine’s most notorious essays. 

In 1995, the LRB ran a piece with the cover line, ‘Was Jane Austen gay?’ Many people were horrified, including its author, the literary critic Terry Castle. Her essay, about Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, was actually a subtle examination of ‘the primitive adhesiveness – and underlying eros – of the sister-sister bond.’ But that wasn’t how the Daily Telegraph saw it…

As a provocative postscript to Austen’s big birthday, the LRB and CLS return to Castle’s piece for the latest in their acclaimed series of ‘concert essays’, after a sold-out performance at the 2025 Hay Festival. Claudie Blakley and Jemima Rooper, celebrated for their performances in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and ITV’s Lost in Austen, respectively, and countless other literary adaptions for stage and screen, will read from other texts too, including Austen’s letters, novels, her nephew’s family memoir and her lesbian contemporary Anne Lister’s diaries. A musical counterpoint draws on works from Austen’s own music collection, new arrangements by Isobel Waller-Bridge of her score for the 2020 film version of Emma, and the two most influential composers of the age of Austen, Handel and Haydn.

The ensemble includes the celebrated organist and pianist James McVinnie, and the soprano Anna Dennis, whose recent performance in the title role of Opera’s North’s Susanna was described by The Arts Desk as ‘in every way, the jewel of the production … she sings with precisely tuned beauty’.

Programme to include:

Thomas Arne: Overture from Artaxerxes

Isobel Waller-Bridge/David Schweitzer: Emma (excerpts from the original soundtrack)

Colonel Mellish: ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’

George Kiallmark: Variations on ‘Robin Adair’

Handel: ‘Chastity, thou cherub bright’ from Susanna

Miss Mellish: ‘My Phillida, Adieu Love’

Haydn: Trio no.32 in A Major, Hob.XV.18

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Runtime: 80 minutes (no interval)

Please note there is no assigned seating for this event. 

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