JASNA's Founders
The trio of gifted individuals who founded JASNA—with different backgrounds, professions, personalities and talents—exemplify the universal appeal of Jane Austen.
Joan Austen Leigh and J. David Grey
Joan Austen-Leigh, a native of Victoria, British Columbia, was a great-great grand-niece of Jane Austen. A novelist in her own right, she also wrote some 30 plays under her married name, Joan Mason Hurley.
Henry G. Burke — a Baltimore accountant, attorney, civic leader and holder of a Ph.D. in political science — acquired, with his wife Alberta, a remarkable private Jane Austen collection which is now housed at Goucher College in Maryland.
J. David Grey, vice principal of a junior high school in Manhattan’s Spanish East Harlem, was the first in his New Jersey family to earn a college degree. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Jane Austen’s life and works and an extensive Jane Austen collection of his own.
First Encounters
Their common love of Jane Austen united the three friends after initial encounters in England. Joan Austen-Leigh first met J. David Grey, “a tall handsome man in a blue coat like Mr. Bingley’s,” at a Jane Austen bicentennial costume ball in 1975 at Oakley Hall near Steventon. Dressed in a gown previously worn by Sarah Miles playing Lady Caroline Lamb in a film of the same name, Joan found herself, like Jane Austen, “prevented from dancing through want of a partner” because her husband was not present. Before the evening ended, however, the charming man in blue approached her: “So much was said. So much was felt.” Joan later wrote that “Jack was the first person I had ever met who knew as much, or more, about Jane Austen than I did.”
Henry Burke (1935)
At Jack’s suggestion, the J.P. Morgan Library in New York invited Joan a month later to bring the author's writing desk to its bicentennial Jane Austen exhibition, notable because its holdings had just been significantly enhanced by the legacy of letters and manuscripts left by Alberta H. Burke. That meeting lead to several more pleasant encounters between Joan, Jack and Harry Burke — and others with Lorraine Hanaway and Juliet McMaster — on both North American coasts. Joan’s husband, Denis Mason Hurley, “bullied and badgered” the two principals to overcome their misgivings and the distance between their homes to get a new society going. The two invited Henry Burke to join them as the third founder, and he provided the legal work needed to create the Jane Austen Society of North America.
Follow-up visits on both coasts developed a desire to create for other American and Canadian enthusiasts an active and welcoming Jane Austen society of their own. At a dinner at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York on October 5, 1979, that ambition was fulfilled.
Jack became JASNA’s first President; Joan, the First Vice President; and Henry, the Second Vice President. Joan also served as founding editor of Persuasions. Brief biographies follow.
These reminiscences were gathered by former JASNA president Elsa Solender, who was present at the JASNA’s inaugural dinner in 1979, from her own memories and those of friends, colleagues and relatives of the Society’s founders.
