An article in Los Angeles Downtown Times talks about tea at the Millennium Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles, where the recent JASNA Annual General Meeting was held.

At the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, the guests’ activities are as diverse as the guests themselves. Self-Realization Fellowship conventioneers are known to take a moment at the lobby fountain to honor their organization’s founder Paramahansa Yogananda, who died in 1952 after giving a speech at the hotel. When X Games athletes were on the premises this summer, a few belly-flopped in the underground Roman pool. And last month, members of the Jane Austen Society of North America were seen raising bone china cups at the Biltmore’s afternoon tea service.

Not that you have to read Austen to drink tea. It’s also an option for harried holiday shoppers, hosts entertaining out-of-town family, and the annual office party planner.

We are glad that the article points out that tea cozies are useful items, not something to be mocked. They really do keep tea hot.

Cristina Odone of the Observer has weighed in on the BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour poll on the ‘book that changed your life’. Ms. Odone sees the poll-takers’ choice of Pride and Prejudice as evidence that “all we apparently want is to be driven from church, dressed in white, an Alpha male beside us. ”

From the article:

Jane Austen’s masterpiece is a perfectly pitched satire on the war between the sexes and the mores of the day. But it confirms, rather than transforms, a woman’s lot. She knew that her own existence - as spinster aunt whose genius received only a modicum of public recognition just before her premature death - would have young women recoiling in horror. No matter how spirited and clever her heroine, an independent life was impossible for a woman of slender means. Had Elizabeth Bennett [sic] spurned Mr Darcy and opted for a life of the mind, she would have been forced to live off her family and been branded a loser. Austen had to bow to the convention of her day - but we needn’t. The fact that we still cling to fairy tales in which ‘he’ saves me betrays a defeatism that now has no excuse. This is the logic that argues that a woman must be wrinkle-free and bouncy-breasted - lest she lose HIM. It is the logic that defends taking on a husband’s name as part of wedding your entire life to his, as one name-changer told the Daily Mail this week.

Ah, yes. Pride and Prejudice is that well-loved tale of a woman who surrenders her individuality, behaving exactly as the social mores of the day required. Who was taught a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous by her Alpha Male rescuer. Who was properly humbled by a man who has no defect, and lived a life of quiet subservience, as would have been expected in her day.