The enduring legacy of JANE AUSTEN

December 16 marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday, and from her onetime home of Bath to our own Blue Mountains, “Janeites” are celebrating. The Weekly joins in the Regency revelry and explores the much-loved author's legacy.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

It's a sunny day in Katoomba, NSW, and the Baroque Room at the Carrington Hotel is full of women in gowns and men in breeches learning reels for the evening's regency ball. Dance master David Potter is calling out steps to a tune with the decidedly unrefined name of Mr Beveridge's Maggot. “It means favourite,” David explains. “It came out of the same place as ‘ear worm’. It's a tune that grabs you. One that runs around in your head.”

The music is particularly thrilling to modern Jane Austen fans - known as Janeites - because it's the piece Elizabeth and Darcy dance to in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma also dances to it with Mr Knightley.

“It's the fantasy,” says Kathy Potter, who is married to David, plays flute at the dances and creates historical headdresses. Anyone who has witnessed the genteel romances that play out in country estates “has the Jane Austen fantasy. And everyone looks good in a Regency dress.”

She and David are part of a devoted group who indulge their love of history, music, costumes and literature at regular Regency events around NSW. This year, their talents have been in greater than usual demand because, all around the world, literary societies are celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth.

In the UK alone, so far this year, there has been an Emma Festival, a Persuasion & Poetry Festival, and a Spring Fling Sense and Sensibility Festival in Bath, and still to come, a four-day birthday celebration at Jane Austen House in Hampshire. In Australia, there has been a conference in Canberra, and all manner of lectures, exhibitions and Regency balls, including this one in the Blue Mountains.