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Closing a Circle
by Dick Bizot

What goes around comes around; and this spring, as Irish Studies at UNF celebrates its 20th anniversary, UNF alumna Jane Britt has closed a circle by donating 80 fine editions of Irish books (plus some CDs and audio tapes) as the core of a silent auction to benefit Irish Studies. The following articles (in the current Irish Studies Newsletter) tell all about the silent auction, the most ambitious fund-raising effort to date by Irish Studies at UNF; but this article has another story to tell, about the closing of that circle.

In spring 1986, Jane, a literature major, enrolled in Modern Irish Literature, UNF's first Irish Studies course. The 28 students in that course had no way of knowing that they were in the vanguard of the several thousand UNF students who would take Irish Studies courses over the next 20 years.

Jane was also one of 11 intrepid souls who signed on to go to Ireland with me that summer. It was a great adventure, that first literary tour, in part because I led the group to a country I had never before visited—and it wasn't a prepackaged tour. I made the bookings, chose the places to stay and the routes to get from one to another and drove the lead van (Larry Weber drove the other van; Tom Ford and Owene Weber were our able back-up drivers). we visited as many literary shrines as we could: Swift's St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Abbey Theatre, Yeats's Sligo, Lady Gregory's Coole Park, Synge's Aran Islands, Joyce's Martello Tower, plus one or two pubs and some memorable bookstores, including the legendary Kenny's of Galway.

The next spring, her last term before graduating, Jane was in my class on W.B. Yeats and then went back to Ireland with the second literary tour group (making sure that we weren't merely retracing our steps from the year before). Again, we visited a pub or two and bookstores.

By then, I think it is safe to say, Jane Britt had fallen in love with Irish literature, with Ireland, and with its bookstores. It was not long before she had retired from her job with a Jacksonville accounting firm, moved back to her hometown of Newberry, SC, and opened—you guessed it—a bookstore. As she gained expertise in the trade, buying and selling fine books, she began to make a name for herself as a specialist in—no surprise—Irish books. A proud moment was the first time Kenny's Bookstore came to her for a book it couldn't find a copy of in Ireland.

Jane and I have kept in touch over the years—letters, emails—and it has been fun to track her development as an entrepreneurial bibliophile. About a year ago she brought up the idea of donating her collection of Irish books, nearly half of them by some of her favorite Irish fiction writers (Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Mary Lavin and William Trevor), to UNF. She had observed some successful silent auction fund-raisers in South Carolina; and between us we cooked up the plan for the upcoming event on March 9.

I am grateful to Jane Britt for her most generous gift; it's a joy to see things come full circle this way; most of all I am glad to have Jane as a friend—both for myself and for Irish Studies.