“Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns,
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot Cross Buns.”
– Street Cry on Good Friday in England
- Hot Cross Buns are a traditional Easter food. Click on this link to read about these rich, spiced tea cakes that taste delicious hot or cold and are served at this special time of year, and about other traditional British Easter foods as well. Click here to read a 1912 New York Times article about these delicious buns and their origins in England.
- Easter Fun at Chawton House this year will depend on good weather. Then again, there’s nothing like a sturdy pair of Wellies and an umbrella to deal with spring showers.
- One can always depend on the Jane Austen Centre in Bath to provide interesting information about the Regency Period. Here’s an article by Laura Boyle on Jane Austen’s Easter and a recipe for boiling and coloring Easter Eggs.
- Here is a fun project on Belly Timber to make decorative boxes that will hold your Easter eggs or candy.
Jane Austen mentions Easter in a peripheral way. Fanny Price pines for Mansfield Park hoping to return soon to the Bertrams after her ‘exile’ to Portsmouth. However, by Easter she still has not received a summons to come ‘home.’:
Easter came particularly late this year, as Fanny had most sorrowfully considered, on first learning that she had no chance of leaving Portsmouth till after it. It came, and she had yet heard nothing of her return–nothing even of the going to London, which was to precede her return. Her aunt often expressed a wish for her, but there was no notice, no message from the uncle on whom all depended. She supposed he could not yet leave his son, but it was a cruel, a terrible delay to her. The end of April was coming on; it would soon be almost three months, instead of two, that she had been absent from them all, and that her days had been passing in a state of penance, which she loved them too well to hope they would thoroughly understand; and who could yet say when there might be leisure to think of or fetch her? – Mansfield Park, Chapter 45
Jane Austen's World 
Wasn’t Edmund ordained on Easter as well?
I think that Austen mentions religious events only in passing because they were so obvious. In the nearly 100% Anglican country it was the same for everyone. So the mere mention of it was creating a certain picture in her readers’ mind. There was no need to describe customs or the meaning of them, it’d be redundant, even though today we’d love to know. So thank you for providing some information and tips for more.
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