Bölümler
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Hello, friends!
So: Does Jane Austen even do happy endings?
It’s a very fair question! And one we’ve explored at the Austen Connection - and now diving deeply into this question is a fascinating new book: Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness is just out, from Hopkins Press.
Professor Inger Brodey is the founding director and co-host of the marvelous conversation, dialogue, and seminar program Jane Austen & Co., and many of us here at the Austen Connection have engaged with their conversations series such as Race & the Regency, and also their seminars from the Jane Austen Summer Program.
And now with this new book Dr. Brodey has produced a deep study on Jane Austen’s endings: How happy are they really, and what’s she doing with them?
The answers are surprising: They involve token survivors, metafictions, ambiguous resolutions, and crashing the fourth wall where Austen’s narrators slow down the pace of the narrative, peer behind the veil of fiction, and talk to us. The reader.
If that all involves aspects of Jane Austen’s stories you’ve never thought about before - stay tuned. Author Inger Brodey is a highly original thinker and scholar, and this conversation explores Jane Austen as not only a young woman of the Regency, and as a weaver of these classic, iconic stories we know, but also as: an Artist.
This is all in the conversation we’re honored to have with Inger Brodey in our latest podcast episode. You can listen here and wherever you get your podcasts - and if you prefer reading, here’s a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited.
Enjoy the conversation!
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You can find more discussion on this podcast episode at the Austen Connection, at austenconnection.substack.com.
Links and mentions:
Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness is by Inger Brodey, from Hopkins Press.
More on Jane Austen & Co - Many of you here already know Dr. Inger Brodey from Jane Austen & Company’s wonderful research and conversation series, or you may have engaged with the popular Jane Austen Summer Program.
Also discussed in this conversation - Dr. Brodey’s favorite Austen film adaptations, which are explored in her book, including: Autumn de Wilde’s EMMA. 2020 film, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (of course!), and an unexpected favorite, Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy, by Andrew Black.
You can listen to this conversation and all our conversations at the Austen Connection podcasts right here, and wherever you get your podcasts.
The late scholar Alison G. Sulloway’s book is Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood - it’s a big fave here at the Austen Connection.
Professor John Mullan’s book is What Matters in Jane Austen.
Further discussion- here are some Austen Connection archive posts on Austen’s HEAs, Austen’s Token Survivors, and Austen’s Fleabag-style breakage of the fourth wall. Enjoy.
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The Mis-Arrangement of Sana Saeed just like Jane Austen’s 'Persuasion' is all about family pressures, class pressures, societal pressures - all the pressures - navigated by two people who once innocently fell into fast love with each other, and are now reunited, amidst conflict and tension. They navigate all that conflict, all that tension, all those pressures, and find their way to each other.
It’s a debut novel from Noreen Mughees, a writer and an engineer specializing in environmental policy. For her day job Mughees works on environmental justice for under-served communities and immigrant communities, and, as it does in Austen, that kind of conflict and examination of power structures also comes out in this book. And so does the romance!
Just like her heroine Sana Saeed, Mughees is navigating life, love, Muslim family and community, and environmental justice issues in her work - and it all comes out in this book. We spoke with Noreen Mughees about The Mis-Arrangement of Sana Saeed as the book was launching, earlier this month. Enjoy this Austen Connection episode featuring our conversation with author Noreen Mughees.
Music for this episode of the Austen Connection podcast is by: Nico Staf, Patrick Patrikios, on YouTube’s free music archive.
You can see more conversations and community about Jane Austen at austenconnection.substack.com. See you there!
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Eksik bölüm mü var?
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Just in time for that much-anticipated and dreaded day - Valentine’s Day - we are celebrating, or commiserating, by dropping a brand new podcast episode that’s all about romance, sparkle, joy, and Jane Austen.
In this episode, romance author Felicity George talks about all of the above, and also her love for the Regency, romance writing, and the long 18th century.
Enjoy this conversation with author Felicity George.
Links:
Music from this podcast episode features:
“Friendly Dance” by Nico Staf
“Sunny Traveler” by Nico Staf
“Emotional Mess” by Amy Lynn and the Honey Men
* Visit the website of Felicity George and learn more about the Gentlemen of London series here
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Hello friends,
Welcome to a special Austen Connection podcast episode - taped earlier this month, for a live-streamed event at the wonderful Austen Con 2022, an international weekend gathering of scholars, artists, and creators on Jane Austen topics, from Melbourne, Australia.
This was fun!
The annual Austen Con is produced by Sharmini Kumar and 24 Carrot Productions, from Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne and it’s also live-streamed.
It was wonderful to take part in this year’s Austen Con with our friend author Devoney Looser, to talk about her new book Sister Novelists: The trailblazing Porter sisters, who paved the way for Austen and the Brontes.
Watch for more upcoming episodes from the Austen Connection, and more posts connecting Jane Austen to so many, many things - here at the Austen Connection as the season rolls out, we’ll be bearing gifts that will drop in your inbox if you’re a subscriber, and if not why not?! Join our community, here.
Links and more reading
* Here’s where you can find out more about Austen Con 2022 - and special thank-you to Sharmini Kumar and Tech producer Tad Errey for help with this production/podcast episode
* Here’s where you can find Sister Novelists, and here’s where you can follow Devoney Looser and sign up for her newsletter Counterpoise - about strong women, we’re here for it!
* Here’s a biography of Mary Robinson by Janeite author and scholar Paula Byrne
If you enjoyed this podcast, feel free to review it!
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Hello friends,
Stephanie Shonekan is an author and musicologist who has worked with the BBC, public radio and written and taught extensively on music, from soul music, to country music, and Nigerian and African-American hip hop. Shonekan serves as the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, and we have created a podcast together, Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan, at the University of Missouri and NPR-affiliate KBIA.
Cover Story is all about life, history, love, identity, and music - through our culture’s favorite songs. And that is also what Stephanie Shonekan’s work is about.
So: We talked about reading Jane Austen while growing up and going to college in Nigeria - and how the stories of Austen might play for young readers in Nigeria growing up and growing into life and literature. Again, it’s all about: culture, identity, love, and the stories we tell.
In this conversation, Shonekan talks about the fact that in Nigeria as a colonial and post-colonial country, she was introduced to characters and stories that did not reflect her family, her friends, and herself - and that was both an awakening of sorts, and also a painful thing to discover. Her answer? To go and find the authors and the classic literature of Nigeria, her home country. Enter: Classic writers like : Chimimanda Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Wole Solinka, and Chinua Achebe. And she asks a very simple but powerful question: Why weren’t these writers introduced to her as part of her education? Why did she have to go and discover them for herself?
This is a question about the canon of classic literature - and how something that can bring transformation and joy, like classic literature, can also, and has been, used to disseminate power, nationalism and empire, and can be deployed to erase culture and identity.
Dean Stephanie Shonekan, in this episode, talks with us about discovering the stories of Jane Austen, and then discovering stories of her own. And then, finally, circling back to come to terms with the stories of Jane Austen. And also: Bridgerton. Because in any conversation about romance, race, and the stories we tell, we have to talk about Bridgerton, right?!
Enjoy this excerpt of our conversation:
Links and Community
* The Woman of Colour: A Tale is a Regency story chronicling the life, love and adventure of a Black heiress, Olivia Fairchild, who travels from a Jamaican plantation to 19th century England to marry. Here’s a wonderful edition from Broadview Press published in 2007 with historical notes by Professor Lyndon Dominique. Some teachers are including this book alongside Austen, an inclusion that would seem to direct address the canon of literary works and what gets taught - let us know if you are doing that and how it went for your class.
* Stephanie Shonekan references some Nigerian classics, including: Chimimanda Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Wole Solinka, Chinua Achebe,
* Patricia Matthew is a well-known author and professor whom many of you in this community know and love. Professor Matthew has written about her complicated feelings about reading Jane Austen, with “On Teaching, but not Loving, Jane Austen,” and on Bridgerton here, and on how she embraced her inner Emma - who can relate?!
* Here’s Chimimanda Adichie’s talk on The Power of Story - that is referenced in this conversation
* We also talked about the writing of Alyssa Cole and her historic and contemporary romance fiction. Here’s the Loyal League series featuring romances set in the Civil War among a network of Black spies working to overturn the Confederacy, which looks absolutely amazing.
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Hello friends,
We’re so happy to be able to share this conversation with the co-creators of the Rational Creatures YouTube series that retells the story of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Inspired by that viral video sensation known as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, aka LBD, Rational Creatures is powered by crowd-funding, inspiration, and friendship. Series co-creators Ayelen Barrios Ruiz Pagano, Jessamyn Leigh, Hazel Jeffs, and Anya Steiner bonded over their love of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and their passion for seeing classic stories retold in contemporary settings.
Jessamyn Leigh created a series called Twincidents based on Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, and Hazel Jeffs created Away From it All, a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd - all four women worked on these projects together while dream-scaping a Persuasion retelling. And then they found themselves crowd-funding it, and producing it.
Rational Creatures is powered by crowd-funding, inspiration, and friendship.
Ayelen and Jessamyn told us that in this series the characters are remade to look more like their friends: They’re working, they’re dating, they’re LGBT, they’re diverse, and of course they’re pining extravagantly.
For this episode of the Austen Connection podcast we caught up with Ayelen Barrios Ruiz Pagano, who spoke to us from Toronto, and Jessamyn Leigh in Oregon. We talked about Jane Austen’s classic story of Persuasion, the characters of Anne Elliot, and Frederick Wentworth, and putting it all into a contemporary retelling with Rational Creatures.
You can follow the conversations about the series, the characters, and new episodes as they drop on the Rational Creatures series Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and of course on YouTube where you can see all the episodes as they drop - for free.
Have you watched The Lizzie Bennet Diaries or any other YouTube retellings of classic literature?
Let us know your favorite characters, favorite themes, and favorite series here at the Austen Connection: https://austenconnection.substack.com/
Enjoy!
More viewing and listening: Check out the wonderful trove of contemporary YouTube series that remix classic literature, many of them created by women. The Rational Creatures team has worked on a few of them together, including Jessamyn Leigh’s Twincidents based on Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, and Hazel Jeffs’ Away From it All, a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd. Enjoy!
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Hello, listeners!
Designer Jennyvi Dizon is a fashion designer whose latest collection - debuting this weekend at NYFW - is inspired by the characters of Jane Austen.
Dizon has been sewing since she was a child - she says it’s how she speaks to the world. Every design she creates, she says, contains a narrative. A story.
In this conversation and podcast episode with the Austen Connection, Dizon breaks down for us how her designs incorporate not only Austen’s complicated characters, from Lizzy Bennet and Anne Elliot, to Mrs. Elton, and Emma - but also their stories.
Dizon by telling us how she began incorporating Jane Austen characters into her fashion designs - and how for her even becoming a fashion designer in the first place meant standing up and using her voice, rather like Elizabeth Bennet to Lady Catherine de Bourgh - and actually, that’s also a gown: The Lizzy Gown, something that might be worn for a time that you need to stand up to someone.
Here’s our conversation with Designer Jennyvi Dizon, about how fashion tells a story - and how loss, for heroines like Anne Elliot and Emma, and also for Dizon herself, can be part of that story.
Thanks for listening to the Austen Connection podcast. You can see more on Jennyvi Dizon here: https://jennyvinewyork.com/And you can join us and sign up for the free newsletter at https://austenconnection.substack.com/
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Hello friends,
Welcome to a new weekend, a new month and a brand new season of the Austen Connection podcast, back right now with this episode!
Kicking off our third season of the Austen Connection podcast is author Nikki Payne - a novelist, tech anthropologist, and cultural observer in all things.
Dr. Payne deploys her PhD in Anthropology for her day-job as a tech anthropologist at Facebook while her love for romance, story, and Jane Austen fanfic has burgeoned into a second career: novelist.
Payne’s Jane Austen remix Pride and Protest is due out November 15th, with a second novel remixing Sense and Sensibility also forthcoming. In Pride and Protest, a remix of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is revisioned as DJ Liza B, who is protesting a major development by a major developer named … Dorsey Fitzgerald. We see where this is going!
Nikki Payne says her favorite romances involve two people coming together across racial, ideological, and cultural divides - and that’s what makes a slow-burning and burgeoning connection intensely exciting.
In this conversation Payne talks with us about how the stories we tell - our “cultural production” - shape our view of our history, our desire, our lives, and our world.
Here’s our conversation with Nikki Payne - on how Anne Elliot is a boiling cauldron, Emma is a mess (but we love her anyway), Shakespeare’s original hate-to-love romance, and how writing romance across boundaries can shape and change the world. Oh yes, and how for Nikki Payne the “classy, bougie, ratchet” vibe of musician Megan Thee Stallion is all about paying the bills, meeting and defying expectations, and navigating your way through to your own brand of desire and style - and all of that is so very Jane Austen.
Enjoy!
Cool links and community:
Find out more about Nikki Payne’s Pride and Protest and sign up for her newsletter here.
You can also preorder Pride and Protest here, (preordering a book is one of the best things you can do to support it!) and you can engage with Nikki Payne’s smart cultural fun on Twitter and Instagram.
Historian Gretchen Gerzina is the author of many books and a BBC series excavating the stories of Black lives in British history. Here’s her website. Oh - and she also has been a guest on this Austen Connection podcast episode.
Abigail Rigaud, who Nikki Payne refers to in this conversations, writes as Heather Lynn Rigaud: https://austeninterlude.com/hl/hl.html]
Also mentioned in this conversation is Bookhoarding by Bianca Hernandez-Knight, who also produces the marvelous VirtualJaneCon.
If you enjoyed this conversation and episode, go ahead and give it a five-star review!
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Hello friends,
It’s a new Monday of a new year. Hope yours is fantastic.
And however it is, and wherever you are, here’s some Jane Austen podcasting to power your Monday.
Louis Menand is a New Yorker writer and a Harvard professor who tries to get his Harvard students to read and understand and appreciate the stories of Jane Austen, among other classic authors - that’s his day job.
He co-teaches and co-founded a year-long freshman Humanities course at Harvard, with author and professor Stephen Greenblatt - the course is called “Humanities 10: An Introductory Humanities Colloquium.”
Menand says that the conversations in that popular Harvard class - and also the ways we read Jane Austen - are getting more global in scope, and more historical.
Our perspectives, you might say, are expanding.
This conversation is the last of our Season 2 series of podcast episodes - you can listen to the entire series on Spotify and Apple, or play/stream them straight from the Austen Connection website.
It was a New Yorker article Louis Menand wrote in September 2020 that captured our attention: Titled “How to Misread Jane Austen,” the piece examines current books and thinking about Austen, and how she is interpreted in today’s world. The ideas of Austen scholars like Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, and Tom Keymer, author of Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics, are explored.
Menand is himself the author of several books uniting history, culture, and ideas: His latest is The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.
We interrupted Menand’s book tour to see if he’d like to take a break from the Cold War to talk with us about Jane Austen. Lucky for us - he welcomed the diversion.
Menand says Austen is important not just as an early, seminal novelist in English, but also as an innovator. You have to understand Austen to understand groundbreaking experimentalists like James Joyce.
Like anyone teaching Austen, Menand and his colleagues also have to get creative in the effort to convince their students about the relevancy of the Regency world. Drawing from wedding and marriage announcements in the New York Times and the New York Daily News, professors Menand and Greenblatt get their freshmen students to see that we’re all inhabiting a world of status and class, and money and marriage, that we have to navigate.
In this conversation, Menand discussed the Courtship Plot and how part of understanding marriage in Austen is understanding math in Austen. That specific Regency-era formula for capital, interest rates, and income is key to decoding the motivations and the stakes influencing Austen’s heroes and heroines.
We also talked about the novel Emma. For Professor Menand, this novel is really about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. As many of you know, I very much agree!
Enjoy this conversation!
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And, thank you for tuning in, friends.
Please let us know any comments or back-talk you have for us on any of the dialogue here - about math, marriage, money, and Austen. And: Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill and Emma.
And, who out there is teaching Jane Austen?
As a journalism professor who has never taught literature, it’d be wonderful to hear how you take on the challenge of making Austen relevant and engaging to students today - whether at the high school, college, or graduate level. Any special tricks? New approaches? General philosophy? Get in touch, teachers. You can simply reply or email us at [email protected] - or comment here:
Meanwhile, thanks for listening.
Have a wonderful, safe, first week of this hopeful 2022,
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
Cool links
* Louis Menand’s The Free World
* Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
* Tom Keymer’s Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics
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Hello Austen Connection friends,
Here in the Austen world I’ve noticed that many of you consider December and the holidays the time of romance: We see you with your lights, your lattes, your Hallmark binges - and more power to you.
Today’s post fits right into your romance dreams, and features our conversation with long-time romance and historical fiction author Vanessa Riley.
And it’s a podcast episode! So you can simply click Play above to stream this conversation, or you can listen on Apple or Spotify.
It also has suddenly struck me that I should tell you that you can, any time, simply go to the Austen Connection site and see many conversations like this one, plus podcast episodes, chats, and general #JaneAusten breakdowns, all free and waiting for you to curl up on the sofa with (don’t forget your cuppa tea). Enjoy!
And now, for our main feature of the week: Author Vanessa Riley.
Dr. Riley - who has a PhD. from Stanford in mechanical engineering - has always found romance to be, as she says, a “happy place.” She tells us she began burning through Signet romances while an undergrad - as a break from “differential equations”!
And she was first inspired to discover the hidden histories of Black and biracial women of the Regency and colonial-era Caribbean when she came across that Jane Austen novel fragment we know as Sanditon. Austen’s biracial heiress of the West Indies - Miss Georgiana Lambe - started Vanessa Riley on this journey.
Dr. Riley’s latest novel Island Queen is all about the real life of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas. Dorothy, or “Doll,” Thomas was a Regency-era entrepreneur who became a dynamic figure in the early 1800s Caribbean. She was born into slavery on the island of Montserrat, and worked to buy her freedom and go on to become a wealthy landowner, leaving a legacy of children, and grandchildren, some of whom were educated in England. And she also had some interesting lovers along the way.
After being introduced to Austen’s Miss Lambe, Dr. Riley began digging for evidence of Regency-era and colonial women of color, and her research led her to the life of Dorothy Thomas, and eventually led to the novel Island Queen. The book has been optioned for the screen by two of the creatives behind the Netflix series “Bridgerton” - director Julie Anne Robinson and actor Adjoa Andoh, who plays Lady Danbury in the series, have teamed up with producer Victoria Fea.
The life of Dorothy Thomas is fascinating, and telling her story involves using a lot of words we might not associate with women surviving under colonial oppression - words like entrepreneurship, agency, manumission, wealth, power, romance. And perhaps the most important three words of all: Happily Ever After.
In this conversation for the Austen Connection podcast, Vanessa Riley talks about how she went from being a Math major, and then an engineer - to being a writer. She says if you love writing, that doesn’t leave you - no matter how many degrees you have.
Enjoy the conversation!
Plain Jane
What attracts you to the romance genre?
Vanessa Riley
The promise of the Happy Ever After. And you need that after you take a test for differential equations.
Plain Jane
Yes! Is this what got you through grad school?
Vanessa Riley
Yes. And undergrad is actually when I really started reading every Signet romance known to mankind, because they were nice and quick. And bananas - the plots were all over the place. And it was just something different to do. You know, engineering programs can be very intense … and sometimes you just want something [where] you know the ending. That you don't have to integrate under a curve. You just want to be assured of a happy place. And romance has always been that happy place.
Plain Jane
Yeah, so you like the structure. But a lot … can happen within that courtship plot. Do you find that you find intellectual challenges within that, that might be surprising to people who don't know the romance genre?
Vanessa Riley
For those who don't know the romance genre, writing romance is actually hard. Romance gets a really bad rap because they say it's formulaic. Well, it's formulaic because that's the promise that they've given to the reader. That's the only genre that you can pick up and get guaranteed to know that it's going to be safe. It's a happy ending. But how you get to that happy ending, how you vary your characters, tasks, and goals, and relationship status, [is] an emotional journey. That is what makes it exciting and different. And that's why there's no two stories that are the same. That is the fun of it. But in order to be that, to give people something different every time, you have to be extremely creative.
[W]riting romance is actually hard. Romance gets a really bad rap because they say it's formulaic. Well, it's formulaic because that's the promise that they've given to the reader. That's the only genre that you can pick up and get guaranteed to know that it's going to be safe. It's a happy ending. … But in order to be that, to give people something different every time, you have to be extremely creative.
And my friends who write romance, I write romance - these stories are just all over the map. They're different. They're engaging you, there's something for everyone. Now, there's something for everyone. That was not always the case. … But it's it's actually a difficult animal. And I find a lot of great writers start writing romance because once you can deliver how these two unique individuals are better together in a plausible way, and then you've taken them on a journey, you have the basis to write other types of fiction.
So it's a great training ground to be able to write romance.
Plain Jane
Well, you know who would agree with you is a great genre writer named Stephen King. I think we're finding that genre is harder than has been previously thought, like you just said. Did you struggle to get it? Did you kind of take it on as a challenge? Or do you feel like it kind of came naturally for you, because you just wanted that HEA, and you just figured out how to get there.
Vanessa Riley
The plotting has always been, I would say, my strength. My mother didn't allow a lot of different types of books in the house. But we had Shakespeare … we had all these different types of things. And so I would kind of junkie out on TV, and I would rewrite episodes of “Dallas.”
Plain Jane
Not everybody, not every kid, is doing that!
Vanessa Riley
So I used to entertain my brothers by coming up with these little stories. And they would be, you know, different variants of TV shows or something that I wanted to change the ending because it wasn't happy: J.R., you know, realizes that Sue Ellen was great. And they got back together and lived happily ever after. And he stopped doing all these bad things.
Plain Jane
So you learned, you learned plotting from J.R. and Sue Ellen …
Vanessa Riley
And structure from Shakespeare. So there we go - the perfect match!
Plain Jane
What attracts you to the Regency period, specifically and Regency stories?
Vanessa Riley
I think because of the nature of the books that my mother made sure that we read, I have an older voice. It's … these worlds always fascinated me. I am a history buff. Another degree I almost got was a minor in history when I was at Penn State. It just - Western Civ particularly - was extremely interesting, the foundations of the world, traveling through Roman history. … I was geeking on it. I loved it.
And then when we get to the Romanticism periods, and I stumble upon this author named Jane Austen, and I'm reading it and I love Pride and Prejudice, and we get to Mansfield - Oh, she's got a little political streak going on in here! And then I get the Sanditon and the wealthiest woman in the book is a … from the West Indies. My father's from Trinidad and Tobago. It's just … like, “Oh, this now makes sense, why I'm here!”
To tell these stories, and as you do more research, and you realize how big the Caribbean part of the narrative of this time period is, and how it has been completely obliterated or obscured, it just makes you say, “Where are my people? Where's the representation?” I mean, all the economies of the world, 80 percent of the GDP is coming from the sugar trade. … But that's all the stolen labor from the West Indies that is making sugarcane and indigo and cotton and coffee, all from all of the colonies in the West Indies. And yet you read romance, you read a lot of historical fiction, and this is not mentioned. You will get the heroic Duke. But you won't learn that his generational wealth is coming from … Dominica or plantations in Demerara. And you forget this piece.
You know, Jane Austen: We think of her as historical. She's a contemporary writer. So she's writing what she saw during that day. And when you get to this Miss Lambe, you realize that West Indian girls and boys, particularly biracial ones, are being sent to London and Glasgow and Ireland for education. Because everyone understands education is going to make the difference in your socioeconomic background. It's going to change the world. And they're sending their kids there.
To tell these stories, and as you do more research, and you realize how big the Caribbean part of the narrative of this time period is, and how it has been completely obliterated or obscured, it just makes you say, ‘Where are my people? Where's the representation?’
And so this mixing and mingling happens, but none of that is recorded. It's very scantily recorded.
Plain Jane
I love it that you bring up the Jane Austen and Sanditon, which I know was an influence for this book Island Queen … an influence for your research. But you just mentioned something. I mean, it is amazing Jane Austen … shows us the foundations of the economic underpinnings of Britain in her world. And she also is showing us the debates going on, but she's doing it - I feel like she's doing it - so subtly. But she did introduce Miss Lambe. It's such a shame, tragic that we don't get to see what she did with Sanditon. But at least we got that much. At least we know that she was bringing in this character. I love it that you say that Miss Lambe is the wealthiest character in the novel. That's left out. And what strikes me, what I want to know, Dr. Riley, is [as] we get into the life of Dorothy Thomas, this one woman that you're exploring the life of through Island Queen, what are some of the things that you've learned about free women of color in colonial Caribbean era?
Vanessa Riley
One, that they exist. Because when I started doing research, I just had a concept of Miss Lambe. And I didn't really understand whether, you know, was Jane just being progressive? Because, you know, abolition during this timeframe is a very hot topic of conversation. … So she's getting both sides of these arguments. Is this just an author being progressive, trying to attack a social issue? Or is she more telling what's happening of her timeframe?
So I go on the search, and I literally find Dorothy Kirwan Thomas because of a sketch that the cartoonist, editorial cartoonist Gilroy draws. I find this picture of Prince William Henry - aka future King William IV - he's lovingly embracing a Black woman. Now, that in itself is remarkable. You have a person in aristocracy and he's in an affair with this Black woman. …
And, unfortunately, women are very poorly documented in history. We were very lucky to have Anne Frank's diary. You don't often come across these - even Queen Victoria's diary has been edited and sanitized so that we don't see some of the things that happened after her beloved Albert passed away. So I had to follow the rich man. I found Prince William. And I find him in the West Indies, and his boys, and they're kicking it up and breaking brothels in Jamaica. They broke up one so badly they had to pay for it the next day. He is is acting a fool in every port he comes into until he gets to Dominica. When he gets to Dominica he's different. His friends are writing letters saying he's with that woman again. … And then I finally get one that says he's dancing with Dorothy Kirwan at the mulatto ball. And we finally had a name. And I thought this was going to be another obscure thing, but then you start researching and you find Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, her will is archived in the UK. Why would a Black woman's will be archived in the UK? And you keep reading and then you find that she's opened businesses in Demerara and in Grenada and in Dominica. And then you find she's had these children. Now that was another thing. Our reproductive history as a woman is our history. So pinning down that she's had children in Montserrat, she's had children in Demerara. … What would make a woman move, particularly the move when she goes from Dominica, where she has a successful business, to Grenada? What's making her move? So you get these unwinding of these stories.
But this woman is phenomenal, that she's able to just restart her life in these various colonies. She does it with children. And she's very protective and caring about these children. And then in Demerara, you find a whole group of women, which I affectionately call the Entertainment Society, these women of color, who have made their money through entertainment. So they're [doing] that through housekeepers, through cooking and cleaning, general huckstering, which is the taking and selling goods made by enslaved people, and selling those to visitors to the colony at higher prices and whatnot. And she just builds this fabulous life. And she, it's just amazing that we don't know her name.
Some of us have struggles taking our kids to Walmart, in the backseat of our minivan. And she's taking 17 [kids] from Demerara … all the way up to Glasgow, Scotland.
Because there’s this world of money that has opened up the world to her, she wants her grandkids to see this, and to feel this, and she's paying for the education of these children. And she's funding schools for the education of colored girls in London. I mean, this is an enormously fabulous woman who rose against all kinds of odds - that she was enslaved, she bought her freedom. She bought the freedom of her family, she made it a mission to whenever she could find family, she would buy their their freedom. For her to be completely wiped off the books, to me, blows my mind.
Plain Jane
Well, let me talk to you a little bit about all of this in your stories. And writing romance. So when you're writing the life of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, you’re writing the courtship plot in a setting that involves colonialism and violence. And you - and Austen also introduces - assault. But the stakes are higher for your heroine, when you're writing in colonialism and colonial Britain, Demerara. It's more violent, it's more oppressive. What is it like writing a romance within those [settings] because this is something that's kind of new territory, right?
Vanessa Riley
Well, this is more of a biographical historical fiction, that has romantic elements. I'm writing her real life. There's no guarantee of a happy ending when you write real life. And so that kind of throws that construct out. But at the same time, these men as I did the history, they are important in her in her life. They change things, they shape her. She has to grow past the problems that they also bring to her life.
And there's a thing that I know as an author … is a misconception that a Black woman during this timeframe was not desirable, was not something sought after, wasn't precious. And I really want to defeat that myth. Because everything that I see, is when two people find each other, they find each other regardless of time, period, space, race, etc.
And so as I looked at the challenges of these men, I wanted that to convey [that]. Because Dorothy to me was someone who lit up a room, even when she was poor, before she had money. There was something about her that drew people, [a] magnetic personality that drew people, men, everybody was drawn to this woman. And I wanted that to be conveyed. … So no matter how hard it gets, you're comforted to know that she's found a way to survive. I have romance readers coming to me, reading my first historical fiction. I wanted you guys to feel safe. Because that's what you expect, as you're saying, in a romance.
And so, I wanted to make sure that you get the concept that these men are in her life for a reason. But she chose the reason. Some of it was trifling. Dorothy was not a saint, I will tell you that right now. Not a saint at all. Because that often happens with particularly Black women, when you do something extraordinary: You all of a sudden are superhuman, you never feel pain. You can vanquish any enemy. Dorothy was very human, she felt a lot of pain. She went through a lot of suffering. But she had a will to survive that I haven't read about in a long, long time.
And I wanted that to be conveyed. And I wanted you to see moments where she is being treasured, where she's being sought after, because I believe that was the type of personality she had. So I get to use all my romantic bones to build a story to make it convincing. So that you will feel her heart breaking, when her heart really breaks.
Plain Jane
You mentioned the presence of love and joy, in Dorothy Kirwan Thomas’s life and other Black lives from history. Can you talk a little bit about love and joy and the need for those elements and these stories and the lack of them and some of the stories that people sometimes expect?
Vanessa Riley
Yeah. You know, typically, when you think of a story that touches on enslavement, you think of the darkness of that. And that should never be discounted. One person asked me, because there's a part in the book, where Dorothy is forced to, in order to be a member of society, in order to not get pushed out of business like everybody else who's objected, she had to turn to owning slaves. It was to maintain her seat at the table. I firmly believe this is one of her wrong decisions. I think one that she wrestled with, but she justified in her head that it's better for me to have a seat at the table, to make sure these people are protected, than not having a seat. And other people could be run out of business. And you know, they may go to debtors' prison, … but [she] could possibly be re-enslaved. And I do believe that's the one line she would never cross, she'd never wanted to go back there. So she did whatever she needed to do. But somebody said, “Why didn't you just leave that out? You know because the book is kind of long, you can leave that.”
No: I don't want history whitewashed. I cannot whitewash history.
And I also want to make sure people don't deify, make these women who are doing extraordinary things, into something they weren't. They were practical women. They were smart. But they were also human and fallible. And they could do wrong things. They can do stupid things. They could do things on the spur of the moment. They had agency but they still had a soul and still could do things wrong as much as they could do things right. And I don't want to paint this false image.
But what often happens is you get stories that are just focused on the pain. … People want to include the enslavement story in their stories, because they want to show how their characters survive, or they want to show people coming in and rescuing the poor slaves … It's pain porn, right? There has to be a reason why you show the violence.
And in my world, for me because I am part of the romance community, I want my people, my readers safe. So that's what I show you. They are safe. They survived.
So as even I show you darkness, you are going to be protected. You're going to be okay, reading this. Dorothy made it. You can read through this and get through the hard parts. But then I also balance the hard parts with the joyful parts - when she's with her children. But she's taking these fabulous trips when she dresses her girls and they go to this fabulous ball and that is a moment that I think cannot be glossed over and it needs to be shown. Because there's pride in that moment. There is joy in that, and she's sharing that moment with her [children], which I think just speaks to who this was.
And so there's not enough Black joy. That's why I'm a big advocate of Black romance, romance in general because you just need to be safe and Happy Ever After. And I'm just so thankful that now Happy Ever After is for everyone.
Thank you for being here, friends. Check out more conversation like this one at The Austen Connection - and you can sign up to have conversations like this one drop right into your inbox every week.
You can also drop us a line by simply replying here, or connect on Twitter at @AustenConnect, or on Insta and Facebook at @austenconnection. And go ahead and weigh in with any thoughts you have on this conversation, right here:
Stay tuned for more talk about romance, holiday films, and Jane Austen - in the coming weeks. We’re looking forward to spending the holidays with you.
Get some rest, read some fiction, drink some tea, and stay in touch, friends.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
Cool links for you
* Dr. Vanessa Riley’s website:
https://vanessariley.com/
* Dr. Riley mentions the work of scholar Gretchen Gerzina - here’s more on Dr. Gerzina, and here’s the Austen Connection’s podcast episode with Dr. Gerzina
* Enterprising Women: Gender, Race and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic https://ugapress.org/book/9780820353876/enterprising-women/
* UCL’s Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/6334
* Here’s Carole V. Bell’s review of Island Queen for the New York Times, which is where we discovered this book
* The Austen Connection first talked with Vanessa Riley for the Christian Science Monitor - here’s that article
Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe -
Hello dear friends,
We’re heading into the holidays - and next week our topic is Bad Families from Jane Austen, just in time for our family gatherings for the US holiday, Thanksgiving Day. Stay tuned for that!
But first, let’s talk about romance.
Specifically, let’s talk about Muslim romance.
The author Uzma Jalaluddin is well known in the Jane Austen world for her retelling of Pride and Prejudice. Her novel Ayesha At Last puts Lizzy Bennet - or Ayesha - in a large Muslim family in the Scarborough neighborhood of Toronto, where she’s navigating complicated cousins, domineering matriarchs, and the rituals of marriage proposals, all while hoping to find the time to follow her ambitions for poetry.
Uzma Jalaluddin herself seems outrageously busy.
When she’s not writing novels, teaching high school, and parenting, she writes a column for the Toronto Star about education, family, and life - it’s called “Samosas and Maple Syrup.”
Ms. Jalaluddin’s latest novel is Hana Khan Carries On. It’s been optioned for the screen by Amazon Studios and writer-producer Mindy Kaling.
In this conversation, Uzma Jalaluddin tells us how she discovered Jane Austen - as a teen, at the local library in the Toronto neighborhood she grew up in - Scarborough. That neighborhood is also the setting for both of her romcom novels, Ayesha At Last and Hana Khan Carries On. It’s a diverse, vibrant neighborhood that now her readers also feel right at home in - at least in our imaginations.
Enjoy this podcast, available on Spotify and Apple, or by simply clicking Play, above. Check out the links to more Muslim women writers and artists below, send us other recommendations, and leave us a comment!
And for those who prefer words to audio or like both, here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Uzma Jalaluddin
I was - I am and was - a voracious reader. Growing up, I was constantly in the library. I was that kid who - the high school that I went to was right across the street from a large public library. And so during lunch breaks after school, I would just head over to the library and borrow books and hang out there. And I just studied there, I would just basically live there. And even my school library, of course, had a pretty good collection of books. And that's really where I was among my people, when I was in the library.
Plain Jane
And was that in Scarborough, Toronto?
Uzma Jalaluddin
That's right. It was in Scarborough. It's the Cedarbrae library, if any of your listeners are from Toronto. It’s a very large building,
Plain Jane
And shout out to libraries and librarians.
Uzma Jalaluddin
Oh my God, hashtag-library-love, I have so much love. And I think so many writers can relate to this, right? Like you become a writer out of a sense of, a love of reading.
And I think I was a teenager - I must have been 15 or 16 years old - and I heard about Jane Austen. And I was one of those kids that just was like, “I want to read all the classics. I'm really interested. I'm going to try everything. I'm going to try reading Dickens and, you know, the Russian novels and Anna Karenina. And let me try Shakespeare,” and all of this. …
So I picked up Pride and Prejudice, and I read it. And I remember the language was, it felt very old-fashioned to me. And it took me a while to get through it. And I did read it. And then I remember after I - because it takes a while, especially as a teenage girl, for it to sort of pick up ... there was something about that book that just stuck with me. And I kept going back to it and rereading it. And I'm a kid and then I'm a child of the ‘90s. So when the 1995 A&E special came out, you know, I got the box set. And I would watch it. My mom watched it with me, it was this thing that we both really enjoy doing.
And I think I've said this before, multiple times: But the books that you read when you're young, especially at those formative ages, the ones that you love, they just stay with you. Those stories just stay with you. And I feel like Jane Austen and specifically Pride and Prejudice - and I did go on further and read all of her novels - have traveled with me throughout my life. And I'm so glad that they have, because … my take on Elizabeth and Darcy came out in Ayesha At Last. And that is a book that has brought me so much joy, sharing with the world, writing it, and all of the things that have come afterwards. It's been truly a privilege.
Plain Jane
I love the way you say that Jane Austen travels with you through life. That is something that really brings people - Jane Austen readers - together too. Because we kind of have fellow travelers traveling with Jane Austen through life when we have this community, which is cool. But I know that from hearing you talk with Janeite communities, and reading some of your interviews as well, that you really see it - correct me if I'm wrong - but you seem to see yourself as a writer first and then the genre romance, the retellings, come second?
So it seems like you were writing Ayesha At Last, and those characters were kind of taking shape, and the story was taking shape, and you realized, there's an element of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen in this, which isn't surprising. Can you tell us how you ended up with a retelling?
Uzma Jalaluddin
My first novel took me a really long time to write. And then it's probably just a function of the fact that I'm a busy person. I'm a high school teacher. I also have two young boys. And when I started writing this book in 2010, I knew that it was going to be a long marathon. And the book wasn't published until 2018. So it took me about seven years for the entire book to kind of take place.
And it wasn't until my fourth or fifth draft, that I gave the book to a friend of mine. And she she pointed out that this has a lot of the elements of Pride and Prejudice. Specifically, she was pointing out the fact that I seem to have a Mr. Darcy character in Khalid, and Elizabeth Bennet character in Ayesha, and a Mr. Wickham character in Tarek, and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, I didn't even see it.”
And that's the ironic thing. I mean, I was writing a book and I was leaning into these tropes, these well-known characters that I love, and I didn't see it. And I made a very deliberate choice. And it was her suggestion, but it was also something that I decided to lean into. I thought, “I'm a completely unknown writer. Here I am sitting in Markham, Ontario, writing this book. No one's heard of me.” I wasn't writing for the Star at this time, either - [I’m a] high school teacher. And on top of that, I'm writing about these unapologetically Muslim characters. Or, as you said, [going] so deep inside of the community that it feels like all I'm talking about are Muslim characters. Who's going to give me a chance? This was like 2014, right? Who's going to give me a chance? Nobody. So let me do something that pays homage to a story that I love, which is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and also turn it and use it for my own devices. Because that story, I think, really resonates with South Asian communities to this day, even though the book itself was written over 200 years ago.
And so that's what I did. I reread - for the dozenth time or more - Pride and Prejudice, and I picked out the pieces that I thought would really translate well, and I went about and I rewrote my book. And it felt like I should have done that from the beginning, because that would have saved me years of drafting. Because that's the book it was trying to be, I just didn't see it.
[T]he books that you read when you're young, especially at those formative ages, the ones that you love, they just stay with you. Those stories just stay with you. And I feel like Jane Austen and specifically Pride and Prejudice - and I did go on further and read all of her novels - have traveled with me throughout my life.
Plain Jane
Well, it's helpful to have some scaffolding for your imagination to just go wild within … to just kind of hold you together. So that does make sense. And you're saying something really profound here in a way, making me realize that the stories of Jane Austen and the Jane Austen community - not to overstate their influence - can provide access to voices, provide an audience, provide access, and provide a way for diverse voices. You've said something really interesting in the Toronto Star, you talked about the challenge that you felt like was in front of you to get your story. And the story of this family, of these characters in the public eye, and published, and you have written in the Toronto Star that “the lack of diversity in the arts has harmed me in ways I'm only starting to untangle.” Can you tell us a little bit about the lack of diversity in the arts, and how and what a challenge that has been for you?
Uzma Jalaluddin
When I wrote that piece, in particular, I pitched it to my editor as a way for me to sort of unpack this, and almost have this as a battle cry. It was an encouragement for parents, my fellow parents - who are maybe first-generation immigrants, unlike me, or maybe are like me, second-generation immigrants … they're, you know, so far removed from their home countries - to encourage those children to go into the creative arts. Because I feel like in Asian communities, in particular, there's such a push to have kids really establish themselves. And I'm speaking - forgive me, I'm speaking very generally here, and I am speaking from a Canadian immigrant perspective here as well, it could be different other places - but I feel as an educator, who teaches a lot of Asian students, there's such a push for children to go into traditional professional fields. So to go into the sciences, to go into the STEM fields, the math fields, engineering. And art is not even considered important.
And yet, art is the basis of culture. And culture is what keeps our society going. And the people who are making the art are very rarely the same ones who represent that same Asian immigrant subset that I'm talking about, or even any marginalized communities.
Things are changing now. But certainly when I was growing up in the ‘90s, and early 2000s, there was very limited representation of immigrants of South Asians, and definitely Muslims. And the types of stereotypes that I was exposed to, as a Muslim woman, were, quite frankly, very toxic. And one of the impacts of that is that … even though I clearly was interested in the creative fields, I've been writing since I was a kid, I've been reading my entire life, I have an aptitude for this and a talent for this. And yet, I never thought that I belonged in this industry, I didn't even know how to go about inserting myself into this industry. Beyond “maybe I should be a journalist” … And instead, I became a high school teacher, because I knew that it's a very stable job. I like people, I like kids. Okay, let me go and do that.
But - I think I was telling my husband this - I started too late. I started in the creative arts, as an adult, as a mother, all of these responsibilities were already there. And so here I am in the position of juggling, like, five or six different jobs, and having a completely [booked] calendar.
And so I want parents to know that … there are opportunities in the creative fields. There is money to be to be made in this. Yeah, you have to hustle a lot. And it's certainly not an easy place to be. But the impact on culture can be so vast, so important, as well.
I get emails even now from people from people all over the world. I just had a letter from a young woman who lives in France and who said she read my book - unfortunately, Ayesha At Last has not been translated into French - but she read my book in English and she said she has never seen these types of stories represented where you have Muslim characters who are just living their life, who are falling in love, who are having funny adventures, and dealing with some serious things but also some lovely things, and how important it was to her, how much it meant for her to see this type of representation.
And I think what it is, is for so long marginalized communities have been erased. And, like what we were just talking, about the point that you made really beautifully earlier about, the retelling is the way that Jane Austen can be reconfigured to represent different communities … And it's actually been a conversation I think in on Twitter, you know, about all the different diverse retellings? And should they even happen in the first place, which is a different conversation. But, I think … it comes back to the idea that there was nothing for so long. And I know what it's like to feel like my stories, the things that I think are important, are just never represented on the page or on the screen.
Plain Jane
That's really powerful. It's wonderful to hear. ... you didn't feel there was a place for you and you forged a place. I feel like that's something that Jane Austen characters are doing. They feel left out of the conversation, marginalized, and they find their way in. … But you say something really powerful here, too: We need to talk about romance. So you mentioned also, to quote you again, in the Toronto Star ... that people of color need more romance. What do you mean by that? And how does this come about, when it comes to that representation, that lack of representation, or that negative representation - and romance?
Uzma Jalaluddin
I think the definition of romance needs to be expanded. Also, there seems to be a bit of a renaissance happening in the romance community, which I'm completely here for. And you know, in Romancelandia, as it's called online, which is the wider community of romance writers, consumers, creators, etc., there's so many up-to-date conversations that have been happening over the years, and I'm a newcomer to this. I've been a lifelong romance reader, but I've kind of stumbled on this community after I became a writer. And it's been fascinating to watch the types of conversations that are happening about race and identity and retellings and consent and just acceptance and tolerance in this very large genre.
Plain Jane
Yeah, … you said something else really powerful - that art is important. And as a journalist, I also feel that way. I feel like that's why I feel arts journalism, and humanities journalism, is important. Because … journalism is the first draft of history, right? … But to me, the interesting part, and the the heavy, impactful part of our history is not just what happened, but how we processed what happened, how we reacted to what happened, how communities and how individuals felt about what happened, and what we thought about what happened. And that to me, that's where the arts and humanities journalism is. … And so if you're looking at Arts and Humanities and the stories we tell, there's nothing more important right now. There's nothing more important in the last year and a half than how we process that. And that's why that's one reason I put a a microphone on the Jane Austen discussions, because the Jane Austen discussions involved, you know, Ibi Zoboi, and Uzma Jalaluddin, and so many people, Soniah Kamal, making the stories of Jane Austen relevant to today and adapting them to today. So I think that's not only okay, I think it's what is keeping it alive. And I'm also kind of quoting Damianne Scott here. … She says it very beautifully. She says ... Jane Austen doesn't want to be on a pedestal. She wants to be among the people.
Uzma Jalaluddin
That is such a good insight. And I've always felt that, and I think that's why Jane Austen has kind of, as I said, traveled with me all my life …
And I think Jane Austen, for whatever reason - maybe it's because of that sly wit, the satire, the description of regular everyday life, middle class life, really, and, of course, upper class life - is just so relatable. And I love what you're saying about art, I completely agree. And my take on it is that the art that has been made for decades has only ever focused on the white experience. And yet, that has been incomplete. If journalism is the first draft of history, and the art that is made is answering the questions of, how do we feel about this? We haven't been hearing from a very large segment of our population. And if we had been hearing about them, those voices have been oftentimes dismissed.
[A]rt that has been made for decades has only ever focused on the white experience. And yet, that has been incomplete. If journalism is the first draft of history, and the art that is made is answering the questions of, how do we feel about this? We haven't been hearing from a very large segment of our population. And if we had been hearing about them, those voices have been oftentimes dismissed.
… Commercial fiction is really where we have these conversations about, what are we obsessed with? What are we interested in? What's the hottest Netflix show? That's where culture is created. Really, [those are] the things that we're kind of thinking about. It's more than a momentary blip, right? It's like the trend in dystopian, the vampire fiction, all of this said something about what we're thinking about as a culture and as a society. And a lot of those stories were written by white authors. And if there are people of color, or if there are Black, indigenous, people of color in those stories, the creators are still largely white authors. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not a proponent of censorship, or anything like that. But I think we have to recognize that there has been traditionally, and culturally speaking, the effect of this has been an erasure of marginalized voices. And so I feel like things are changing slowly. Very, very slowly. But they are changing. And I'm interested in hearing those voices. And so part of that is romance. What does love look like to bring it back full circle?
Plain Jane
We interrupted ourselves, but there you go. I was gonna bring it back to romance, but I just will say: Muslim romance,
Uzma Jalaluddin
Yes! Which is something that is very rarely, if ever, explored, unless it is through the prism of culture. … So the main character, it's always the same type of storyline: The main character, if it's a woman, is pressed, has to break away from the bonds of her family, and has to basically give up everything about her culture and herself. And embrace the wider, usually North American, Western type of society in this way. She is freed - there's always kind of a white-savior complex type of storyline, or there is a rejection of her own community.
I think we have to recognize that there has been traditionally, and culturally speaking, the effect of this has been an erasure of marginalized voices. And so I feel like things are changing slowly. Very, very slowly. But they are changing. And I'm interested in hearing those voices. And so part of that is romance.
But Muslim romance, the thing that I'm interested in, is a little bit more nuanced than that. It can be love that's found with another Muslim person, with another person of color. It can be love that is found with someone who isn't Muslim and … it could be perhaps an LGBTQ exploration of this. I want all of the stories. I think we need to have all of these stories that show that the Muslim experience in North America that was an experience globally is not a monolith. My experience as someone who grew up in the ‘90s and early 2000s, in a more conservative Muslim family, is going to be different than someone who's growing up, you know, even in my neighboring country of the United States.
But the stories that I write, I usually have two South Asian - both my books feature two South Asian or Muslim characters. And their faith is just the background information about them. They're not having conversations necessarily about, Should I be Muslim, or should I not? Should I take off my hijab? Will my father disown me? They come from loving families, they know who they are, and they’re secure in that identity. And the romance really is about other things, you know, and because I write romcoms, they tend to be more situational.
Plain Jane
I love that. And it's something, as you said, your characters are unapologetically Muslim. And that's really fun to see. … [W]e have to talk about your Darcy character. So your leading man, Khalid … is like Darcy. And he really is like Darcy. But it's funny because … they're both stiff, somewhat formal and awkward, handsome, a little emotionally aloof, for various reasons. But Khalid has a very good reason and it’s better than Darcy's reason: Khalid is part of a traditional Islamic community. And following the rules and interested in the rules. And Darcy's reason, as far as I can tell, is just that he's socially awkward. So in some ways, your Khalid and your “Darcy” has much more of a societal underpinning, stronger underpinning, than Darcy, where you're just kind of left at sea, like Elizabeth, thinking, “What's going on with him?” And then here's Ayesha, who doesn't have that question. She knows exactly what's going on with him. And she's got to work through it. So this is so much fun for, as you say, situational comedy. Can you talk about Khalid as Darcy?
Uzma Jalaluddin
Khalid is the reason I wrote and I didn't give up on Ayesha At Last. I have to first put that out there, because he is the character that for some reason - this rarely happens for writers - but he just burst into my imagination completely, fully formed. I just knew who he was and knew what he wanted. I just completely understood him. I can't emphasize how rare this is, as someone who's trying to write their third book and I don't know anything about anything right now. It's just very rare. But when I finally … came to the realization that I was writing Pride and Prejudice, late in my drafting, when I finally put that together, that Khalid was Mr. Darcy, it just made so much sense. Because what I'm trying to do through Ayesha At Last is to write a really fun entertaining book that my readers will enjoy. But I'm also trying to engage in a conversation about appearance versus reality.
So here's this guy. And I think that's what Jane Austen is trying to do as well. And in so many of her books, right? Here is this person who is judged from the moment that you see him because of the way that he dresses, because of the way that he acts, and the assumptions that the reader themselves might have about this type of person. And Darcy is the same way, right? He's an aristocratic man, everyone thinks that he's proud and he's disdainful. That says more about their own insecurities, though. Admittedly, he is quite rude. In the very beginning.
Plain Jane
Of course, yeah ...
Uzma Jalaluddin
Classic hero. And Khalid, in his own way, is awkward and bumbling and rude. But on top of the regular social awkwardness of a classic, romantic hero, we have that layer of his Muslim-ness. And his Muslim-ness comes out in very overt symbols that make the people surrounding him very uncomfortable, because he is really comfortable in the way that he embraces his faith. I purposely made him almost like a cartoonish Muslim guy. Like he was wearing a long white robe to work and a skullcap, he had an unkempt beard. And I did all this on purpose. I made him an extra on homeland. And yet I decided to put it in my book, because I wanted to throw this in my reader’s face - and the Muslims and the non-Muslim readers: This is this is your villain. This is the guy that you've been trained to be afraid of. Look at how hot he is. Look at how sexy he is. Look at how romantic he is.
Plain Jane
I will make you fall in love!
Uzma Jalaluddin
Exactly, exactly. And in that way, I had a lot of fun deconstructing the Muslim man archetype. Because I live with Muslim men. I’m raising two Muslim men. I've been married to a Muslim man for nearly 20 years (he refuses to grow a beard, I keep trying to get him to grow one. He's not interested!) I have a brother, I have a loving father. I have uncles. And I never saw the men that I interact with on a daily basis, who were Muslim, really adequately represented in the wholeness of their person and their humanity. And I wanted to correct that. ...
Plain Jane
When it comes to Muslim romance, you have some interesting developments in Ayesha At Last. One thing that's interesting is that - I don't know if you would call her a white character, Caucasian character, if that's what she is - Clara? Her boyfriend Rob is super sluggish about proposing and he can't get his act together and Khalid, our hero, helps Clara negotiate a proposal and a dowry? And I don't know what you were wanting readers to get from this, if anything, but it had me wondering whether ... there are some things in traditional Muslim cultures and religious cultures that you think are helpful to women? That seemed to be what was being depicted. And if that is something that's probably worth unpacking - that complicated aspect of rituals, and the rituals that we all embark on, whether we like it or not. They're in our culture.
Uzma Jalaluddin
Yeah, I never thought of it that way. I, to be honest, I just thought it would be really funny to have the girl get a rishta from her boyfriend, who she's been living with for five years. And the guy who sends her the rishta is this bearded Muslim man. I- just in my head, right? Because I have to keep going! - and these jokes just keep me going.
I did all this on purpose. I made him an extra on homeland. And yet I decided to put it in my book, because I wanted to throw this in my reader’s face - and the Muslims and the non-Muslim readers: This is this is your villain. This is the guy that you've been trained to be afraid of. Look at how hot he is. Look at how sexy he is. Look at how romantic he is.
But I think there's a lot of merit in what you said. Yeah, of course, cultures can learn from each other and gain certain positives and negatives. As much as I've learned, you know, from from my wider Western upbringing in Canada - I'm just as Canadian as I am South Asian, as I am Muslim, right?
There's so much about all of these cultures that I've learned from, and hopefully other people can pick up from this.
And really what Khalid is exhorting Rob to do is, say, “Why aren't you having this conversation? It's very obvious that Clara has been trying to hint to you for a very long time, why aren't you picking up the hand? It's time to, you know, figure this out, you're going to lose her. And if that is the consequence for your inattention that's on you. But here, let's just, let's just be completely upfront about this.”
And I think this is someone who is very direct, I really appreciate this about South Asian marital practices. And I have to point out that the rishta process is South Asian, it's not really a Muslim thing. Okay, other cultures who are Muslim, they might have like a different marital custom. But it's a very South Asian practice, rishta, which is a proposal, like an arranged-marriage proposal. I really appreciate the directness of it. There's always a goal. It's like, we're not just casually dating. We're dating because we want to know if we can build a life together. And if that life together involves marriage, because that's what you want to do, that's fine. But, like, this isn't just for seeing each other, and let's see where this goes. No, no, there's none of that: There's a deadline within a certain amount of time. You’ve got to figure this out.
And ... that's what Khalid brings to the table here.
Plain Jane
Rob will never change. That's the way Rob is always going to be - somebody’s always gonna have to be strong and basically put it on the table.
[O]ne thing that I had in my notes Uzma … that kind of made me laugh when I looked back and saw this in my notes, was, “We need to be talking more about Khadija.” You mentioned the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Can you tell us about her and why she has an appearance in Ayesha At Last?
Uzma Jalaluddin
Growing up I went to Sunday school, and you know, all of the type of stories that you learn, you know, like I'm sure Christian children are taught Bible stories, and Muslim kids are taught Muslim stories. So one of the stories that we're always told is that Prophet Muhammad was married to his first wife - because she died, and he later remarried - was a woman named Khadija, and she really liked Muhammad, peace be upon him. She really liked him, so much that she proposed marriage to him. And she was 15 years older than him. And actually, he was one of the traders that she hired. So he was actually working for her at the time. But she was really impressed by his honesty and his trustworthiness and his authenticity. And so, as you do, she was just straight up and said, “I'm interested in you. Are you interested in me? Let's get married.” And he accepted.
And, you know, the traditional story was that he was extremely happy with his wife, even though he was 25, and she was 40. They were married for 15 years before she died. .. [W]hen he received revelation from God, as the traditional mythology goes, she was the first person who accepted Islam, the first person who supported him and believed him, and was his partner in all things - an equal partner, and in fact a more successful partner because she was the one who was the hard-headed businesswoman, who was kind of running things.
And I just thought this story is not well known, I don't think, by a lot of people who aren't familiar with the Muslim faith. And it just goes to show you that there's so much emphasis on the darkness of the way that Muslims are portrayed around the world, that there's no room for these lighthearted stories.
And that's really what I wanted to get across in Ayesha At Last. Muslims can fall in love too. We need our romance stories, need our love stories, just as much as any other community. Maybe even more, because we've had so much darkness heaped on us by the actions of some people who have done extremely violent things. But also [by the] decisions of other people who have portrayed Muslims, over and over again, as violent extremists.
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Thank you for being here, Austen Connection friends.
Let us know: Are you a reader of romance, Muslim romance, and retellings? What are your favorites? Did this conversation inspire you to think differently about contemporary romance, romcoms, and the stories we tell, and what it all has to do with Jane Austen? Have you read Ayesha At Last and/or Hana Khan Carries On? And/or, what are your recommendations for the Thanksgiving holiday, if that’s a thing where you live? And if not, let us know your weekend reading plans? Comment below!
As always, you can find us right here, on Twitter at @AustenConnect, and on Facebook and Insta at @austenconnection.
Meanwhile, have a beautiful weekend.
Wishing you all the light, joy, and romance,
Plain Jane
Cool links:
* Here’s more on Uzma Jalaluddin’s books and bio at her website: https://uzmajalaluddin.com/
* Here is another Muslim writer whom Ms. Jalaluddin recommends: Ayisha Malik: https://www.ayishamalik.com/bio
* And check out the Muslim comedy and romance in the work of Huda Fahmy, also recommended by Ms. Jalaluddin: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Yes-Im-Hot-in-This/Huda-Fahmy/9781507209349
* Here’s Uzma Jalaluddin’s Toronto Star column about writers of color breaking through: https://www.thestar.com/life/parent/opinion/2021/09/21/as-a-parent-teacher-and-writer-i-urge-creators-of-colour-to-raise-their-voices-in-the-arts.html
* And this Toronto Star column is on romance and writing the light rather than the darkness: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/opinion/2021/04/05/dis-romance-all-you-like-i-choose-to-write-happy-funny-stories-as-a-light-against-the-darkness.html
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Hello friends,
Today we bring a new podcast episode and conversation that I think you will love. It’s with Damianne Scott, an educator, writer and speaker in the Jane Austen community - she teaches literature at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College and Cincinnati State University. And she’s the host of the Facebook page, Black Girl Loves Jane.
She’s also working on a very intriguing project right now - rewriting the story of Jane Austen’s Persuasion into the setting of an African-American megachurch.
In her own book project, Persuaded, due out from Meryton Press next year, Ms. Scott makes Anne Elliot a PK - or preacher’s kid. And as Dr. Cornell West has pointed out, in a legendary talk at the JASNA Annual General Meeting of 2012, Jane Austen was also a PK, or preacher’s kid.
This is a world that Damianne Scott knows well, and it’s a world I also am not unfamiliar with - I also, as it happens, am a PK - so I really enjoyed this conversation.
Ms. Scott says that as a student of 19th century literature, which she has loved since middle school, she often has found herself the only Black student in the room. So she appreciates the nontraditional casting of shows like Bridgerton, but has also watched and addressed the backlash that has arisen from that production and from the PBS series Sanditon.
An article Damianne Scott contributed to JASNA.org, or the Jane Austen Society of North America online, addressed the pineapple controversy surrounding the Sanditon series. A chorus of viewers felt that using the pineapple emoji as a fan symbol for the show was insensitive to the cultural weight and the connotations of colonialism and of the slave trade carried by that symbol. Damianne Scott weighed in, and she weighs in here, in this conversation, saying she hopes people and the community of Austen lovers and fans will continue to grow and understand that - as she says - Austen doesn't want to be put up on a pedestal: Jane Austen, she says, wants to be among the people. I love that.
Press play here (above) to stream this from any device, or find the Austen Connection podcast on Spotify or Apple. Enjoy!
And for you word lovers, here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Plain Jane
Let me talk a little bit first about Persuasion. So why do you love the story of Persuasion?
Damianne Scott
Well, I love the story of Persuasion … It was my first Jane Austen novel that I read in college. And the first one I did a paper on. So that was one reason why I loved it.
Second, I do enjoy the movie, the one that [from 1995], with Ciarán Hinds, the BBC, is one of my favorite adaptations.
And then I like it now. Because Anne Elliot is very adaptable for any woman today, who is over a certain age who is not married, who has no children, and who has come to bear the responsibility - either willingly or unwillingly - to be the caregiver of their parents, and their finances, the dependable child in the household.
And I find that very relatable to me, because I am not married, have no children, and have become the pseudo-caregiver [and] financial-responsibility person, in my family.
So it speaks to me.
The other thing is, I think that Persuasion in itself, again, is very adaptable to what I'm doing now with my rewriting of it and modernizing it.
Anne - she's always criticized by her father for the way she looks. There's that famous scene where, you know, she's talking, and he's like, “Oh, your skin looks better today, you changed cold creams”! And he talks about the naval officers, and he talks about Admiral Croft and how, you know, he looks pretty well for somebody who was in the Navy!
Plain Jane
And it's very funny, like, it's a source of humor, but also it's just, you feel Anne’s pain. I mean, any woman in the world feels Anne’s pain with all of this. We're also laughing at it.
Damianne Scott
Because he's totally ridiculous! Like, really. So it is very funny.
And so my adaptation- it's a little focused on physicality. So my Anne does not necessarily have a skin issue, but she has a weight issue. And then, because she's in this community, a small community - well, not a small community, but anyone who knows about African-American megachurches, which is where my book takes place ... people can still pretty much know your business, because it's a small community.
Plain Jane
So let me - I have to ask you more about this: I want you to talk about this retelling, but I will just say, I grew up going to Black churches. And I grew up going to megachurches. But never a Black megachurch.
Damianne Scott
Well, there actually are not that many.
Plain Jane
Well, I grew up in a sort of evangelical background. So I didn't love the megachurches … So can we just pause for a second and you tell me: Why that setting? Why the Black megachurch?
Damianne Scott
Well, because I'm familiar with it. It is, you know, my world. I go to church now. And so, though my church was not a megachurch, in the terms of how we think of it, when I was growing up, it had about 500 members. And at that time, so those were like mid-’80s, that was a big number of people. And then my pastor, he was the head bishop of the state of Ohio, for our denomination. So I'm very used to that church, where everybody knows your business. And you know what it means to be a preacher's kid, so I wasn’t a preacher's kid. But I know what it means to be a preacher's kid and deacon’s kid, someone-of-authority’s kid, everybody talking about what's going on and everybody else. It is a village mentality.
Plain Jane
Yeah, that's so true. And it is like a village. You were starting to say everybody knows each other's business. It's like the “four and twenty country families.” But I love what you're sayingd: there's a hierarchy, it can be a very wonderful, close community. It can also be a fairly oppressive community. And nobody shows this better than Jane Austen, right? I just have to say, Dami, so you were going to megachurches in the ‘80s; I remember going to the megachurches in the ‘80s. And this was in Atlanta. I would not have stepped foot in there without, like, [full] makeup, hair …!
Damianne Scott
Oh yeah.
Plain Jane
So, whole thing. And I kind of resented that, you know? So what was your experience? What has been your experience in the church?
Damianne Scott
So … I think I am not critiquing the church as a whole, pastors as a whole, as [much as] this particular pastor. But yeah … I came from a denomination for a long time [where] you didn't wear makeup, so that wasn't a problem. But you know, we were dressed, you didn't go to church and pants … you put together your hair, no jeans, there was no such thing as wearing jeans to church, on a Sunday morning. … if you're a woman, you wear a skirt. … I didn't resent it, because that's all I knew. I didn't feel oppressed by it. Especially when I was young. My friends were there, my family was there. That's where I participated in things, where I cultivated my speaking abilities or my writing abilities. So it didn't find it oppressive, to me, growing up at all.
And then as I grew up, something altered and changed. I did start seeing things a little different, because then I realized, you know, church is also business. And so sometimes, it's all business, just like with all denominations … preaching one thing and doing the other. And so there is a little greed aspect to some churches - not all, of course. So … with this hierarchy, there is a power trip …
Because of how the system was set up in America, systematically, the racism, the church was the only place where Black people could have clout. So if you are a pastor, or deacon, if you're a missionary, you have power. You have clout. What you say, goes.
And so if you are the child of a pastor, a bishop, or whatever, people are looking at you. They expect you to act a certain way, be a certain way, do things a certain way, because you are not only reflective of Christ … but you're also reflected on that power structure.
If you do something, you are challenging that power structure, that whole thing might fall down. And so Sir Walter, my character, he is a pastor of a megachurch. But he also has some gambling issues, and some spending habit issues. And he puts his church into debt, where he's almost losing the church and the upper limits of his power and his clout in the community. And then he has these children and one of them … is fiscally responsible and capable and efficient and knows how to run things. He doesn't see her value because she doesn't represent what he thinks a daughter should look like. Physically. … She’s someone with intelligence. She's kind of challenging his wisdom … his thought process.
And so that makes it really Austen. Even though it's 2021.
Plain Jane
That's so great. Everything you're describing is this character - that's so Austen, a character, a strong woman, a smart woman who's undermined and undervalued, and just how frustrating that can be. But Jane Austen just shows people how to go forward. So that's kind of what appeals to you about the story of Persuasion?
You mentioned a teacher encouraged you, in your Facebook Live [event]. You called it an adult fairy tale, in a way because she does persevere, doesn't she? And is gracious.
How does she get by? How does she survive? And why is this an adult fairy tale?
Damianne Scott
Well, I guess the fairy tale part is because there is no, necessarily, fairy godmother, or magic - just that Anne kind of realizes that what she wants is important and valued. That she should move on. I mean, the only reason why she doesn't marry Wentworth in the first place is because Lady Russell and her family, and the small community that she's involved in, is like, “No, he has no money. He doesn't represent what we represent, being gentry … You can't marry him, he has no money.”
And of course, during that time, having money was the most important thing - you're not marrying somebody necessarily for love, you’re marrying somebody for connections, growing the family, making sure you're not starving, especially if you're a woman. So all your sisters are not starving.
So this is what you're getting married for, you’re marrying for the benefit of society, and particularly your small society.
And so what Anne does is realize at the end: “Bump that! Now I'm wanting to do what I want to do, where my voice is heard, and I'm gonna marry this man that I love, that I probably [should have] married eight years ago, but I listened to y’all.”
And so I think the magic is that she realizes her own worth. And that there was somebody who already recognized it and she kind of let it slip away. And she gets a second chance to rectify it, which is something most of us do not get - that second chance to rectify a decision that we made incorrectly. And I think that's why it's a fairy tale.
Plain Jane
All right! … Do you find yourself having to explain to people about why you love Jane Austen, that it is about hardship? It is about endurance and survival? It's not just about finding somebody to, you know, to marry and carry you off. That it is about what it is like to get through life with responsibility, and how to do it graciously, and how to, hopefully, how to find happiness?
Damianne Scott
… My friends, they just don't understand that at all. They think of Austen as, you know: the dresses, the balls, the bonnets. And it is, let's not get it twisted: It's part of it. That is the appeal for people who read it today or look at the movies today. It's the romance. Because I mean … all the major novels that she wrote, all the main characters get her man, they get married. We may not see the marriage, but we know they get married.
So for some people, that is the appeal of Austen, that is what they look at for Austen. That's why they read Austen and that's all they want. And that's fine.
Others, like myself, I'm interested in also the other themes that are going on, the nuances. Because the nuances of the dance, [for instance]: Well, why are they doing that particular dance? Why can't women inherit from their fathers? Why [is it] they cannot work? What was going around in England at that time, to make it the way it is?
That is what interests me also. And so, in the community itself … my biggest push is just trying to get them to understand not only the historical, which many of them already do, because that's why they're Janeites, and they really dive in and they're really scholarly about it, where I'm not as scholarly about a lot of the issues. But my biggest question is just to see that it’s text, it’s ideas that are open to all people. And... that it can be open to other people who might not necessarily have been in the thought of, or the mind of, Austen when she wrote those novels.
Plain Jane
Well I love that. And I want to hear more about that, Dami. So you started the Facebook page Black Girl Loves Jane to basically do what? To kind of put a stamp on that?
Damianne Scott
Yeah, well it initially started as something really for me to do, where I could share Jane Austen's quotes and wits and books and all that. That was in August of 2018. So it's pretty new. Just something to, like, put a quote of the day or a photo of the week. And then I would share something that was happening in my life that that wisdom either expresses or answers for. And then my goal was to then have other people share their experience that is similar to the quote that I placed out there today.
And I call it Black Girl Loves Jane because I'm a Black girl! So I was a Black girl who loves Jane, which is an oddity! It's not completely, like, not heard of - you know, I've met and seen other women of color who love Jane. But for my circle, I am the odd man out and in college, here I am trying to get my master's degree in English, and I am the only African American who’s in a Victorian class or British Romantic class, you know, trying to read Shelley and Austen and talk about these things. And I'm the only one there.
And so what Anne does, is realize at the end: “Bump that! Now I'm wanting to do what I want to do, where my voice is heard, and I'm gonna marry this man that I love, that I probably [should have] married eight years ago, but I listened to y’all.”
So that's how it started. And I just like classics in general. So it's not just Austen. I love Hardy. I was presented to Hardy when I was 14 in school. So Hardy was who I started off with, because my teacher did not believe that I would like Austen. Because he was like, “Oh, you like Hardy? You're not going to like Austen because Austen is happy and they get married.” … We never could read anything modern. So every book we read in high school from ninth to 12th grade when we had to do a book report was a classic. You know, everything else was Hardy, or Eliot, or Dickens, or Austen.
So I was like, “Okay, this is a world I'm not used to. I've never been introduced to these classics before. So here we go.”
My first book I read was Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Like, “This is what's happening in England in the early 1900s?! Okay! My goodness!” I read Hardy, and then [continued in] high school, college.
And then it has eventually over time has evolved to just trying to make the case, in whatever small way I can, that Austen is not just for Caucasian people, that Austen is not just for people from Britain, that there are other cultures that can benefit from the lessons of Austen, or from other classic literature as well. Because anything I deem to be classic is something that is relatable to everyone, if you're willing to do the teaching to make it relatable. I think part of the issue, especially in high schools today, and maybe in some colleges … is that we teach these books, particularly these books that are in the canon, as unrelatable to anyone who's not white, or young … or whatever, and we tell you, “You're never going to understand it.” And really what it is, is the teachers are going to have to figure out a way to make it relatable and teachable for whatever generation they are presented with.
And so part of my reason for writing my version Persuaded, part of my reason for why I read other modernization versions of Austen's novels and other classic novels, is because I have this hope. I want to have this hope that it's reachable even to this generation, and that if we don't learn how to make it reachable to the next generation, they're going to die. These classics are not going to be classics anymore. They're not going to want to teach Austen, or Dickens, or Toni Morrison. They're not going to want to teach them anymore because they won't feel they are relevant today. And so, books like, hopefully books like mine, but also Pride by Ibi Zoboi is giving that attention, making that way. And also Unmarriageable [by Soniah Kamal] which I just read too, is making that way, that it is so relatable! These are my people! Even if it is, you know, 1789 when it's written, and I'm reading it in 2021. These are my people. This is what's going on in my life in my world, too. And she's speaking to me. And so that is what my goal is.
Plain Jane
Awesome! Listeners can’t hear that I'm snapping at Dami. I love it. It just makes Austen so much richer, when people realize [that], like I feel like they have already with Shakespeare. So I think you're - hopefully, you're right, and I am too, because I have the same hope - that it's just a matter of imagination. It's just a matter of changing the way we see it, changing the way we teach it.
Damianne Scott
I always try to - even with my students, because I teach English Composition, but I have taught upper-level classes as well about literature - and I'm always trying to get my students to understand that period just means it happened at a certain period of time. And the themes and experiences that we are having are the same themes and experiences that they'll be having 75 years from now, and the way that they were having 75 years ago, if you get through all that superficial stuff, right? Yes, you might have to practice some of the language because Shakespeare is no easy man, by any means! But the themes, the lessons, really what he was saying is just as modern today as anything else.
Plain Jane
Let me ask you, Dami, what would you like to see in any kind of Persuasion adaptation? What do you think makes it work for today? Because there are also two films coming out.
Damianne Scott
There is, and one I'm really excited about because one is going to be a color blind or nontraditional Persuasion, what they're calling nontraditional casting, where the Wentworth character is going to be played by a person of color.
Plain Jane
Oh, is it Cosmo Jarvis? Yes. Okay.
Damianne Scott
Yes. So he's, going to be playing Wentworth. And then Mr. Golding, Henry Golding, who I adore, he is playing Mr. Elliot. Cousin Elliot, I guess. … So, it’s nontraditional casting.
And so that's what I was excited about, that we had that happening in the era of course of Bridgerton, which I also loved. But [it] also got a lot of flack. And those who are Jane Austen fanatics did not appreciate Bridgerton, some have not appreciated casting for this new Persuasion. And it's because of the nontraditional casting.
So for the past six months or so, I've been doing some talks and things like that. I did one for “Race and the Regency” for Jane Austen & Co., where I'm pushing this idea: “Why not? Black people were there. Why are we acting like Black people are not there? There are people of color there, there are people from South Asia, India, were there during that time.”
So I don't understand why people get upset about this notion … as if Austen was this historical document that could not be altered. It's fiction! It's fiction! Everything in it is fiction.
I guess in England during that time, there is the wars going on at the time. All that has happened. I know this is happening, but again, it's still a fictionalized world, some of the cities don't even exist, really, in England. And these are fictionalized stories.
And so the hullabaloo about Bridgerton, particularly, it's the greatest thing right now, is somewhat disconcerting to me. Which is why I make Black Girl Loves Jane, because I just don't understand it. That icing out of cultures who are sometimes forced to read Austen, but they can't be in Austen? They can't be in an Austen film, but you're gonna make them read it as part of the literary canon that you have in school, but then they can't be in it? Doesn't make sense to me.
[P]art of my reason for why I read other modernization versions of Austen's novels and other classic novels, is because I have this hope: I want to have this hope that it's reachable even to this generation.
So I'm really excited about that. And I'm looking for not only for Persuasion to do it, but I'm looking forward to a time where it's not a big deal. So that is what I'm looking forward to, not only with Persuasion, but all novels and really, you know, all classic novels. Where it's just not a big deal. And I don't always go into it, you know, by any means, looking at any kind of film or book. I'm like, ‘Oh, there's no Black people in it. So I'm not gonna read it, or people of color.’ That's not me at all. But I do when I'm looking at it. And as I get more past the the surface stuff, but to the actual discussions about modernization and race and class, there's discussions to be had: … “What is wrong with this scene? Or, what's wrong with this theme that is being carried out through this period? Why was it established? What's wrong with it? And how have we rectified it? Or have we rectified it in 21st century England or America? Are there still class systems that's going on? Are they still based on race? Are they still based on it?”
I am just saying that, like you said, the new normal has to come about where it's not such a big deal.
I don't know if you know that I published an article in JASNA.
Plain Jane
Thank you for reminding me - Yes, I did.
Damianne Scott
Well, one of the things I mentioned is, and that's part of the problem, I said, is that there is this need to hold on very tightly - for many British citizens, but it's the same here in America as well - to this history that is not accurate. So this why people get upset with Bridgerton, or nontraditional casting in some Dickens movies, is because they're holding on to this idea of what they believe they are. And even though their history was told to them incorrectly … the challenge of it that's coming about in these last few years, it's very disconcerting for people. So this is why people have a cow.
When you're going to have a multiethnic person play Wentworth, this is why people are upset that you have as the high royal in a drama going on in 1830 Regency be a Black queen. This is why people had a cow when the Jane Austen museum said, “Oh, we're going to establish and talk about how Jane lived during this time slavery,” and people have a cow about it.
It’s because it is challenging an idea and a history that is so ingrained in them, that, “Who will I be, if I am not the owner of Shakespeare or Austen or the Bible, or, for us in America, this great southern tradition? Who are we, if I don't have this? Or if you're telling me that I was wrong, or that my ancestors were wrong for what they did back then. And so therefore, you're now deeming me to be wrong.”
And that is part of what solutions are going to have to come about. Because the change is coming. But how can we bring people along? Because it's scary to say to somebody, “Okay, you don't own Austen. I know you're Caucasian, I know you're a woman, and I know you might just want to tackle the stories of love and romance in these novels. But there's something else going on. Jane lived in a time of extreme upheaval. And if you say you love Austen, then you have to love all Austen. And some of what’s was going on with Austen is not pretty.” Not necessarily with her, because she was a supporter of abolition, but what was going on around her was not pretty.
And it's not all about the balls and the dresses, and that's scary for people.
And so my hope is also that we can just have these dialogues where people don't feel like we're attacking or trying to take away something from them, but instead, understand and come to realize that we're trying to add to something that they already have.
Plain Jane
What would you like to see in our conversations going forward to be more equitable and inclusive? In our conversations about Jane Austen?
Damianne Scott
I guess what I really would like to see in the future is just this real, true understanding that people of color are not trying to - like what we've just discussed - invade people's space. What we're trying to do is say that we were always there. And that we want to be seen. And that we want to be accepted.
Now, does that mean you have to go back and change 250 years of history?
Well, no. You can never change that slavery, you can never change that there was a feudal system, and there were the landed gentry - you can't change it.
But the idea that we are … this exclusive club, that is a problem.
Because the change is coming. But how can we bring people along? Because it's scary to say to somebody, “Okay, you don't own Austen. I know you're Caucasian, I know you're a woman, and I know you might just want to tackle the stories of love and romance in these novels. But there's something else going on. Jane lived in a time of extreme upheaval. And if you say you love Austen, then you have to love all Austen.”
So, hopefully, the future is that when we have these discussions, and have these conferences and have these things, that we are interested in the needle-point, and the dancing, and the foods that Austen ate; but we're also interested in the history of what was going on with the slave trade that was happening at that time. And we're also interested in how they were treating women. And we're also interested in talking about what they were doing with the tea that they were taking from India. And then we're also interested in, in all these other maybe somewhat earthy discussions about Austen and that are just as prevalently produced and advertised and populated and attended, as the latest discussion about how to make a bonnet. I am for you learning how to make a bonnet. I want to learn how to make a bonnet too. But I also want you to know that often, we put Austen on a pedestal. Austen does not want to be on the pedestal. We put her on there. And we make her so unreachable: She can only be talking about “this,” she can only be presented “this way.” As long as we keep Austen on that pedestal. she's going to die. Her words, her wisdom, is going to die. Because the one thing my generation - Generation X, Y or millennial - we're not looking for people to put on pedestals. We want people who want to be among the people. And Austen is among the people if you let her be.
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Thank you for being here, friends. Please talk back to us - let us know your thoughts on what Damianne Scott says here about how we read, and teach, and talk about Austen, and how we can make Austen more relatable.
Teachers and professors, how do you introduce Jane Austen’s stories to your classes today? Do you find that it’s helpful to, as Damianne Scott says, consciously think about how to engage young, diverse readers with the classics and to help them see, as she says so beautifully, that Austen is speaking to all of us? And is among us? Let us know! It would be fascinating to continue this discussion!
You can comment, here:
Meanwhile, watch for more conversations coming up, including new podcast conversations with Ayesha at Last author Uzma Jalaluddin, Island Queen author Vanessa Riley, and Harvard professor and long-time New Yorker writer Louis Menand on “How to Misread Jane Austen.”
Thanks to you for listening, engaging, and making this the wonderful community and conversation that is growing and thriving. Invite a book-loving friend to join us!
Have a wonderful week. You can stay in touch with us on Twitter at @AustenConnect, on Facebook and Instagram at @austenconnection, or you can simply reply/comment here.
Stay well and stay in touch,
Yours affectionately,
Plain Jane
Cool links
* Here’s Damianne Scott’s piece for JASNA.org on PBS’s Sanditon series and the pineapple controversy: https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-41-no-2/scott/
* Here’s our piece on Damianne Scott and BGLJ Facebook page in the Christian Science Monitor: https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2021/0917/Is-Persuasion-the-Jane-Austen-story-we-all-need-right-now
* Meryton Press - where Damianne Scott’s retelling Persuaded is due for release next year: https://merytonpress.com/
* More on the upcoming Persuasion film adaptation, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding: https://deadline.com/2021/05/dakota-johnson-netflix-henry-golding-persuasion-cosmo-jarvis-suki-waterhouse-richard-e-grant-nikki-amuka-bird-1234754639/
*This post was updated to reflect that Damianne Scott also teaches at Cincinnati State University.
Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe -
Hello my friends,
You’ve been through a lot this with us this October - our month of horrors has explored the haunted halls of Mansfield Park, the monstrous mousiness of Fanny Price Ultimate Conqueror, the Drawing-Room treachery of Jane Austen’s parlors, and now we cap it off just in time for Halloween weekend, with this special post and podcast episode featuring professor and writer Maria DeBlassie.
For Dr. DeBlassie, ordinary life is full of dangers, threats from the real and every day, and what she calls ordinary gothic. Everyday treachery is everywhere and it haunts Jane Austen's novels, where our heroes are forced to face down drawing room dangers even among so-called polite society. But Dr. DeBlassie also has an answer to this problem. She says everyday magic, and the empowerment and joy and romance found in nature, in the power of stories, and in yourself, can help you slay the everyday demons.
So, for this special Halloween edition of the Austen Connection we're having a conversation about gothic romance, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, feminism, bodice rippers, witchery, and everyday magic.
And somehow Professor Maria DeBlassie ties all of this together in her work and in her life. Dr. DeBlassie is on the faculty at Central New Mexico Community College and teaches in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico.
In her teaching, her writing, and in her brujeria practice, Dr. DeBlassie is all about finding joy and empowerment, especially as women, as a women of color, and from indigenous or marginalized backgrounds. She says magic, witchery and reading Jane Austen can help you form a magical path forward from trauma and fragmentation based on marginalized identities and to conquer that ordinary gothic that we all face at times.
And when you think about it, Jane Austen's characters are all about conquering the ordinary gothic - Fanny Price, Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland - they are constantly conquering the everyday treachery of people around them. Think of patriarchal Sir Thomas, Sir Walter, Henry Crawford, the Thorpe siblings, John and Isabella.
These characters and the dangers they bring can relate not just to the everyday but also the political, the cultural society, and the world we all share.
But Dr. DeBlassie also teaches the romance genre, and she believes that Jane Austen has an awful lot to say about our everyday relationships.
Here’s our conversation about ordinary gothic - the disturbances, toxicity, danger, and general creepiness surrounding us - and finding a path forward through story, and everyday magic.
Enjoy!
Plain Jane
So let me start with: I saw you on Twitter talking about your work, as a professor, about Northanger Abbey, bodice rippers. What is the title of the class? And what's in it? What are you teaching in it?
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
So the title of the class is “From Bodice Rippers to Resistance Romance,” or something like that. And it's looking at courtship novels, bodice rippers, and historical romances, and really thinking about how the courtship novel in the 18th century, 19th centuries, really developed this beautiful form of storytelling that centered women's lives, that centered the domestic sphere, and people's emotions.
So we look at that and how that genre really inspired the modern romance novel, particularly the historical romance. And then there's a real, spicy couple of decades, where we get the bodice ripper in the sort of ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. And that's when people introduce sex. And you know, it's really colorfully described sex scenes into the historical romance. So the bodice ripper is really what most people think of when they think of romance novels. They think of the sexy clinch covers, and Fabio, and now and then we end up the class looking at contemporary historical romances that are really thinking about centering people with marginalized identities, in stories about happy endings. And I think it's incredibly powerful to have those stories, so people of color, people from the LGBTQ-plus communities, people with disabilities, they get to see themselves having happy endings, and seeing it in stories that are set in the past. Because I don't think people realize that the past is a very complex space. It tends to be whitewashed and heteronormative and ableist. Like the way we talk about that history.
So when we look at historical romances that center people of color, for example, it's really reclaiming that space and undoing a lot of that historical erasure.
So that's kind of what we look at in the class and it's a lot of fun. You look at sex positivity and gender, politics, and all sorts of really fun things with it.
Plain Jane
What comes out in these discussions that delights you? Or surprises you? I'm a teacher too. So I know you learn from your students. What do you learn from them? And what do they what do they surprise to hear from you in these conversations?
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
For me, it's always funny because I'm so steeped in this world of reading romances already. So sometimes I forget what it's like to be someone approaching the genre for the first time. So it's always fun to see students engaging with it and being pleasantly surprised that they can analyze and think critically about a really joyful genre that they can have fun, when they're analyzing and unpacking things.
And then, genre that's really considered pretty much fluff has a lot of really interesting, complex, intense, problematic ways of framing things historically. You know, we have issues of imperialism, colonization, race - all these things are playing out in these stories. And it's really fun to show them how that's working.
I think it's incredibly powerful to have those stories, so people of color, people from the LGBTQ-plus communities, people with disabilities, they get to see themselves having happy endings, and seeing it in stories that are set in the past. Because I don't think people realize that the past is a very complex space.
So even a frothy fun book is actually pretty loaded and charged and doing a lot of different things. Sometimes it's really positive stuff. Sometimes it's not so positive.
And I had to laugh, because when we did, we read The Pirate and the Pagan by Virginia Henley for the bodice ripper. And it was the first texts we read that have sexually explicit content. And there's a moment where students were like, the stories that center our emotional lives or sexual lives or romantic lives - they're so charged, they're so over the top. And yet, they're really saying such beautiful, important things that affect us in our day-to-day lives. And it's it's beautiful to see students engaging with that, responding to things that really gave them wonderful ideas about their own lives, their own relational lives.
And also how they will catch things that I don't catch.
So one of my students thought there was a character in The Pirate and the Pagan who was queer coded. And I was like, “That's amazing. That's so brilliant.”
So they bring their own interpretations to things, which is so powerful. I think that that's great. But do we ... start the class with Northanger Abbey. We watch the 2007 BBC film adaptation of it, because I think it just does an absolutely wonderful job of looking at why readers - particularly young women - are reading these kind of lurid over-the-top, you know, scandalous stories.
Plain Jane
Well, let's unpack that a little bit. Northanger Abbey. I guess that's probably the Andrew Davies adaptation, which really, I think starts with or has kind of embedded in it all these fantasies. Catherine Morland's fantasies depicted, which is a great thing to do for the screen, I think. And it makes it in some ways more Gothic than the novel feels.
What do you unpack and what do you talk about with Northanger Abbey?
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
So I love that film adaptation because I think it takes the novel and really pops out the conversation that's being had in it. Northanger Abbey isn't as popular [in] the Austen canon. But I think it's because a lot of people don't know about Ann Radcliffe and all those sorts of stories that young Catherine Morland is reading. If we situate it within its historical context, people are reading it, and they know just what kind of juicy content Catherine Morland is reading.
So, I really love the film adaptation because of those fantasies, we really get to embody and experience all this excitement that's going through Catherine's mind. And I teach it to my students in terms of a young woman's sexual awakening and the real power of the ravishment fantasy. And so that's where it can become a little bit tricky territory because, you know, we're talking about the Me Too movement, we're talking about, consent is mandatory in all things. Their old-school bodice rippers have really problematic rape scenarios or sometimes it's euphemistically called “forced seduction.” So we're really thinking about, Why are all these things playing out? ... I think it's really about seeing these books as a safe space to explore your sexuality and really understand the difference between a ravishment fantasy versus what you want to see happen in real life.
One of Catherine's first fantasies in the movie is being abducted by highway men. And it's such a funny scene because it ends with her, like, in the highway man's grip, and she has this terrified [look], but it slowly shifts to pleasure and excitement. Of course, you know, that's the moment where you realize she's just completely lost in this fantasy of what is this whole wide world. What is this sexual world she's being exposed to in these books? What is this new adventure she's going on, because she's never really been outside her hometown. And it's just the pure joy of that.
Now, by the end of the story, when she is in a situation, she's kicked out of Northanger Abbey, by General Tilney, and she does run the risk of running into some very real highwayman. In a way … she has to go home and she's unsupervised. She's unprotected.
Plain Jane
That's an interesting point.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Yeah. She realizes, these are two different things - the fantasy of being desired and having desires. It's very different from the real-world dangers that I have to negotiate.
Plain Jane
It's interesting, I love that you point out the word fantasy, I find myself saying this in the posts. And it's just kind of funny, but it does need to be said. And I think in some ways, the reason it still needs to be set is because we're largely talking about female desire. It's like, we have all watched plenty of Tarantino films, we know that sex and violence goes together in our culture, and that there's an erotic aspect to violence. It's when there's that erotic aspect to our violent aspect of female desire that people get confused. But especially because there are these important questions about feminism and, who is attractive? You mentioned this, who we find attractive is a social construct in so many ways. And … the other thing going on with romance, of course, Maria is that it is a huge industry, it is a big bestseller. That is reason enough to treat this seriously. As a genre … it's so foundational that I have really been wanting to explore this. And I feel like that's one of the fun things about Northanger Abbey. And one of the fun things about Jane Austen, is that it is still so foundational to what we find romantic and to these stories that we tell.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
And you know, everyone, I think kind of dismisses Catherine as this young girl who gets swept away with her imagination. And, you know, the huge butt of the joke in the story or the huge, you know, ongoing joke is that she's overreacting to things in her daily life or blowing things out of context.
But as I was rereading the book and watching the movie for my class, I realized: actually, she has really great instincts, and all the stuff that she feels uncomfortable about are actually things she should feel uncomfortable about.
Like when … John Thorpe. He takes her [for[ the ride. She's like, I feel really uncomfortable with this. But everyone kind of gaslights her and makes her feel like she's overreacting. It was like, no, she should feel uncomfortable with that.
Plain Jane
I love that scene. I love it that you highlight that scene. I feel like it's easy to just “drive by” that scene. … She's literally being forced to stay with him, he will not stop the carriage. Who's been in a car that you weren't sure was going to stop? Or a door that you weren't sure you're going to be able to open? Austen is really giving you that scene and she's making it funny, but she's also showing you something very important, as she always is: That this doesn't feel good. And she's making you feel it. She's making you feel that frustration, and she's making you feel the danger of that moment.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Yes, absolutely. And the way, you know, other women can be complicit in that, right?
His sister's helping to orchestrate that situation. And, you know, each and every time Catherine kind of brings up a question like, “I'm uncomfortable about how we're doing this,” Isabella and John, you know, kind of talk her out of her feelings or undercut her emotions. Which, you know, I call that like a really good example of ordinary gothic. It's something that happens all the time. That is actually really bad and problematic, right? That's how women second guess themselves about their instincts.
But people don't perceive it as something gothic or scary because it's just so normalized. And then on the other hand, we have Henry Tilney, which she just kind of knows he's a really good guy. She just has this feeling about him, which ends up proving really true.
So it's interesting. So as flighty, and as flaky as she might seem, she actually has a pretty good head on her shoulders. And the books are helping her better process and navigate her new world that she's exploring.
Plain Jane
Yes, and at risk of sounding extremely repetitive for people who listen to all of the Austen Connection, I really feel like that's one of my favorite themes of Austen: She's showing you what you expect first, you realize even by the end that, “Oh, she really does have something going on.” Even over Henry, at the end of the day, she's right. She encounters true danger. Like you say, I love that, at the end is the patriarchy, is General Tilney - Can't get any more patriarchal, right?
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
He's like the classic gothic villain, you know. The evil patriarch archetype. And it's there in both the book and the movie, when Henry Tilney at the end, really [scolds] Catherine and lays into her about her fantasies and how she's assuming that there's all these evil goings-on in his family. And it's really not, you know, that's not the case at all. And it's true that she does kind of a violating thing by trying to sneak into - I think she's sneaking into his mother's chamber to find evidence. So, you know, some sort of disaster.
Austen is so great at having those really horrifically, like secondhand embarrassment scenes where you're like, “Yeah, you know,” it's like, Mr. Knightley says, “You did a bad thing.” And I felt uncomfortable just reading and watching this. But you know, I love at the end of Northanger Abbey that Catherine really feels rightfully apologetic and chastised by Henry Tilney, when he's like, “You have no right to intrude on my family's stories like this.” But then he later comes back. And he's like, “Actually, what you were feeling and thinking was, right. I mean, you took it out in a weird way. But my mom was really unhappy in the marriage.”
And so I love that he's able to apologize and say, “Well, I didn't like the way you executed things. But you actually picked up pretty quickly everything that's going on with my family dynamic.”
And to me, that's such a powerful moment, because you know what a gothic romance is about what are romance novels about? It's about traditionally young women entering the marriage market and having to negotiate all these new things: the rake, the evil gothic villain, the wonderful hero, and trying to figure out what kind of marriage alliance, what kind of marriage or love match am I going to make?
Because in Austen's time, if you choose the wrong marriage, like, you're screwed. You're kind of locked into that. So women were seen as property of male family members. So once they chose a marriage, and usually they didn't have a whole lot of agency in that they're pretty much locked in. So General Tilney’s wife had more of a tragic marriage story. Because she thought it was love. You actually married her for her money, and now she's stuck.
So what Catherine Morland is really looking at in reading all these gothic novels is, How do I avoid the worst possible situation and find the best possible situation? You know, happiness, love, stability, and a partner who sees me as an equal.
So, again, she seems real, like a horny teenager, you know, just really getting into like, “Wow, all these men like me,” but there's another real part of her thinking, “What's my future gonna be like, and how do I negotiate all these things and not get carried away and make the wrong choice?”
Plain Jane
There's so much at stake with marriage. And listening to you, I realized that it must be really lovely to be exploring these stories with you in the classroom and to have you as a teacher.
Claudia Johnson wrote something and Dr. George Justice and I were talking about this in a … podcast, that Claudia Johnson writes about “the fantasy of benign authority,” which she's describing Knightley, and you're making me realize Henry Tilney does come back and say, “Well, you were wrong, but essentially you were right.” I wonder if that's part of the fantasy? Knightley does the same thing, you know: Emma's matchmaking for everyone, and he says, [in] a really romantic moment, and we're all swooning, basically … he says, “You would have chosen for Mr. Elton better than he chose for himself.” Such a smart thing to say, like, “Yeah, you're walking around wrong, but you're not as wrong as everyone else.”
Which I think is kind of what Austen's showing us with her heroines a lot as well. She's having fun with these mistakes they make. But there're still more right than everyone else .. And so I feel like she she's kind of doing something feminist in that. … Dr. George Justice, and I were reminding ourselves … it's Austen, creating these powerful characters. She's creating this powerful patriarchal symbol, with Pemberley and Darcy, and Knightley and Donwell Abbey. She gives us the most powerful person - you can imagine Henry Tilney and Northanger Abbey - and she kind of conquers them. But then the fantasy is they come back and they say, “You were right. You're smart”!
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Well, not only do they say, “You were right,” they say, they’re sorry. And I think if we're thinking about romantic connections, really being able to have a partnership with someone who knows when to apologize, and knows when to say, “Hey, maybe I was wrong.” That's pretty powerful. And it's not something that people would list as things that are super sexy, but it's actually very sexy. Day in, day out.
Plain Jane
I love that comment. I mean, … you are the expert, How well do bodice rippers and our romances do what Austen does? Which is, she shows us the companionate marriage and she basically shows us the love. She shows us the lust. That last is a little easier to grasp - that fantasy, the eroticism. I mean, it's intuitive. But the companionate partnership is not so intuitive. That's something that you have to learn and really observe and really think about. … I love the post-game analysis Austen gives us (I can't believe I've got a sports analogy because I'm not a sports person) - I love it. She gives us postgame analysis. There's no better word for it really. With Knightley and Emma, particularly with those two, Austen's doing this. So consciously - like, this is not an accident: These are very intentional. Those postgame analyses. I feel like she's very conscious about showing us how to have a good relationship.
I think if we're thinking about romantic connections, really being able to have a partnership with someone who knows when to apologize, and knows when to say, “Hey, maybe I was wrong.” That's pretty powerful. And it's not something that people would list as things that are super sexy, but it's actually very sexy.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
And how to communicate with people. I always tell my students, it's such a good example of close reading and analysis. Those scenes when they break down - like in a Pride and Prejudice when Darcy and Elizabeth finally get together, and they basically break down every encounter they had with each other. What it means. And it's like, this really good example of close reading and analysis and also like, a healthy way of talking about your relationships. Because no one's perfect in this world. What matters is, can you communicate? Can you work through stuff?
Plain Jane
Can you tell us more about what you call ordinary, everyday gothic?
So when I'm not teaching, I'm a writer and I do witchy stuff. And I write about everyday magic and everyday, ordinary gothic. And so the idea behind those things is that magic and the mystic and the wondrous are around us every day. Sometimes we really look way far outside ourselves, or outside our daily lives, in order to find that kind of luminous or mystical experience. You know, I kind of equate it with people feeling like, they need to need to travel all over the world to get that and they're not thinking about how to find happiness in their daily life, right? Ordinary gothic is a similar theme, but it kind of tackles the darker side of that magic, which is the way we can normalize toxic behaviors, or we can kind of push past … like uncanny experiences, we’ll kind of write them off. Or things that make us feel uncomfortable, we’ll kind of pass through, bypass those feelings.
And so, the ordinary gothic is those moments of the uncanny, or a sense of disturbance in our daily lives that we don't necessarily register as gothic or creepy, because it's so normalized.
So a great example of that, like we said earlier is with John Thorpe, when he just kind of talks [Catherine Morland] into that ride, when she's just like really saying, No.
You know, we see that, as you said, playing out in our life, so many ways, when that one person does something when we're like, No, we're really uncomfortable. But we're made to feel like we're wrong for wanting to lay down a boundary, for example.
Or a really good example of ordinary gothic is Fanny Price. And everyone says she should be marrying Henry Crawford. And everyone's like, “I don't get what your problem is.” And she's literally like, “Hey, he's done a bunch of bad stuff. He's gone after and dumped Maria Bertram, like he's behaving badly. I'm not comfortable with this.” And [Sir Thomas], his response is, “Well, why don't you go home to poverty for a little bit, think it over, and then let us know how you feel.” That's a really great example of ordinary gothic, because he's making her feel her limited status as someone who came from poverty, and really trying to force her hand into a relationship that is going to be actively unhealthy.
… Henry Crawford is not a good man. And she knows as much as he's putting on the charm now that will fade, and she'll be trapped in a loveless marriage. Now, objectively, we would say, “Oh, it's just a family member of the patriarchy, having our best interest at heart and trying to marry her off to a good suitor.” The ordinary gothic comes in when her background is being used to manipulate or coerce her into a situation, which we know is toxic.
You know, Henry Crawford, there's those lines. And I think the 1999 film adaptation makes them a little more sympathetic. So that's how people think of him. But in the book, you know, he talks about wanting to like, tear a little hole in her heart. The way he describes it, it's like, it's not actual love for her. It's this conquest thing. It's this violence.
So again, a really good example of ordinary gothic, where objectively, we think, “Oh, here's a rich, sexy man who flirts and really loves you and wants to take care of you. Why aren't you married?” But there's all these other social underpinnings that are really quite toxic.
Plain Jane
And one thing that you talk about in your work too, that I want to ask you about and that I love is the … let me see if I can look at the words you use. You talk about the unseen mystic which you're talking about here too. But specifically with the ordinary Gothic, you talk about … Hang on, let me see if I can find it because you say it so well. On your website: “reclaiming our power, specifically as women of color, fellow marginalized identities, of those in need of hope and healing.”
When I listen to you, Maria, talk about Fanny Price. and also Catherine Morland up against the very powerful General Tilney, I wonder if some of these ordinary gothic stories can be extrapolated to larger issues. I feel like Jane Austen was showing us with Sir Thomas. Yes, Sir Thomas. Who's almost benevolent? He's really almost benevolent, but then he's very much not. And he's not in a way that's sort of that benign dictator. And I wonder if it's a metaphor for Imperialism. So all of that to say, I wonder if that ordinary gothic can be extrapolated to something larger about reclaiming spaces as marginalized individuals - reclaiming power, like you say.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Absolutely. And I think, you know, when I first started reading Jane Austen, I was an undergrad, so feels like 1000 years ago, like 15 plus years ago. And I was really trying to explore what happiness looks like. And I have a very complicated relationship to my own cultural background. So it's indigenous, latinx, and European. And essentially, we're products of colonization. So it means we have this very fraught history that really gets romanticized. But there is this history of violence in our veins. And, you know, at the time, there wasn't a lot of discussion about how that impacts communities, specifically with the goal of moving beyond those narratives of trauma. So I was trying to figure out, “Okay, well, I know I have this here. But how do I move forward? I can't just wallow, right?”
So the gothic is there to say, “Yes, bring all that out into the light.” And then once that rupture happens, we need to move forward.
So I started reading Jane Austen, because I took a phenomenal class in undergrad. And first of all, it's just such a wonderful community, it was so nice to just nerd out with people who just love these stories. And my mom got me into I'm reading, you know, watching BBC adaptations and stuff. So I really want to learn about this. And I fell in love with the stories in undergrad, because I felt like they were helping me figure out what happiness looks like, specifically for people who weren't, you know, crazy rich and could do whatever they wanted.
When you you still have to kind of live in the society that you're navigating. And I also love that it was really centering domestic and emotional lives. So I'm a really domestic person. I'm also an introvert. And so the long walks across the Moors, and the quiet reflections in the sitting room. Like that really spoke to me.
And of course, it's also kind of a problem that I had to go to white narratives to find those examples of finding happy endings and working through difficult things. But over the years, I've realized it's also about being expansive. Like, what stories are we allowed to enjoy? What stories are we allowed to be part of?
I'm really happy to see the Jane Austen fandoms becoming much more inclusive and exploratory. There's people queering the Jane Austen characters and doing all sorts of really wonderful stuff.
And that's really, what got me started on my road in many ways to brujeria. And thinking about reclaiming that magic of everyday life, and reclaiming space for ourselves and finding that empowerment. And recognizing that a lot of times, that's going to look a lot different from the traditional narratives that are told about people of color. You know, we're told, we can only read or enjoy certain things. We're told how we're supposed to feel about our relationship to our culture, and there's a lot of stereotypes in there. But literature is really an outlet for us to explore and reclaim our agency. And Jane Austen was one of the authors that really helped me discover that.
Plain Jane
That's wonderful to hear. And I also feel sad that it had to be a white world that you went to for that happily ever after. And I'm really, really excited that we're just changing that and I feel like Jane Austen would be extremely excited that we're changing that too.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Absolutely. And it's so much easier now because, you know, as I've been writing more and been more vocal about these [things], I've had so many friends of color, friends with marginalized identities, reached out to me and be like, “Oh my God, I've been quietly trying to work, trying to do this to or to figure out a way past these kind of trauma narratives.”
Because it's so much of what stories about people with marginalized identities are, it's like trauma narratives. And it becomes like an element of torture porn after a while.
It's like, “Why can’t I be centered in a happy story?” And then it's really marvelous to see that at the same time, I was kind of exploring things with Jane Austen, things on the internet and these online communities. We're seeing this really fruitful exploration of people from all different backgrounds, reclaiming their agency and their right to joy and telling more inclusive stories that center that.
I mean, now I can find so many wonderful romances, for example, that center BIPOC joy, or queer love, or all these things. So, you know, that was just something I didn't have access to 15-plus years ago.
Plain Jane
That's awesome. Tell me Maria, a little bit more about your background? And, and you've kind of mentioned how finding Jane Austen fit into it. But can you tell me a little bit more about it? And how you have reconciled with with it? And with your romance reading?
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Yes, absolutely. So I have a pretty complicated relationship to my cultural identity, just because, again, we do have that history of colonization. So in New Mexico, it's the Spaniards who came in through Mexico, and conquered indigenous communities. And as a result, we have this very interesting, mixed cultural heritage now. But unfortunately, a lot of that heritage gets whitewashed because there's this huge history of cultural assimilation. So you have families that will only insist that they're Spanish, but not Mexican, or they want to erase any indigenous connections. And a lot of us don't know what our full mix is because of that erasure. So part of what we're grappling with, is really coming to terms with the fact that we can't know everything about our cultural or ancestral past, even though it is something that can still affect us and those energies. And that's where I get into some of my witchy stuff, you know, the ancestral hauntings and the, the kind of echoes of the past in our blood. And so the only option we have is to move forward. And to say, “I can’t always go back and reclaim things. Sometimes I just don't know enough, or I will never be able to figure out what my full ancestral background is. And sometimes it's not a healthy thing for me to do, depending on family dynamics, etc.
So where do we go from there, then? Well, the answer is, we move forward. We craft new narratives that pave the way and move beyond that trauma, or the fraught past.
And this is a huge part of my brujeria practice. It's allowing us to move past the stories that are told about us, and really carving our own path. And part of that path is joy. So when you have a marginalized identity, so for me as a woman of color, it can be hard to feel like you can access that sense of pleasure or joy. So, particularly if you've ever been exposed to Catholicism … there can be also a very shaming aspect to pleasure and joy, particularly sexual pleasure or things that are just for the sake of enjoyment. And that comes into our backgrounds through Spanish Catholicism that really shamed indigenous communities and women.
So part of what we're reclaiming in finding new ways of telling stories in our brujeria practice is our right to joy, is our right to sexual freedom, is our right to our own agency and autonomy.
But actually … when you're grappling with all those issues, that's how Jane Austen and then eventually romance novels really helped me. Because they were just stories about joy, people figuring their stuff out in everyday life and in finding joy.
So when I really started looking into romance novels more seriously … it was just so wonderful to read stories about people being tender and having emotions and working through stuff, and really feeling that the beauty of human connection.
And in fact, in one of my classes, when, at the start of the pandemic, when we all had to move online, we were at the start of our romance novel unit for a class I teach on sex and gender culture. And a lot of my students kept reading romance novels after that, through the pandemic, because they felt it had a huge impact on their mental health, to just find these moments of joy. And so for me, I call this, it's my part of my pleasure magic practice, where you just kind of create space for warm and fuzzy things.
And of course not all more romances are created equal. The bodice rippers, again, have a lot of really old-school problematic content. And some of the newer stuff can too. But when you find those stories that really speak to you, you know, they're healing you in fundamental ways. And they're nourishing your soul and letting you know that you're allowed to be more than histories of oppression, essentially.
Plain Jane
Yes, that's so well said. So tell me, the brujeria practice, and you say it so beautifully, that it's about going forward. And it's about carving out these stories for yourself for the future and finding joy. So tell me more about the everyday magic and everyday witchery. And those rituals that sustain you and help you plow ahead.
Dr. Maria DeBlassie
Yes, thank you. So I just actually just published a book on it, Practically Pagan: An Alternative Guide to Magical Living. And it's really about being intentional about how you want to live. So my theory of practice is a little bit different in the sense that I write for the pagan- or witchy- curious. I teach a class on witchcraft and pop culture for my students.
[W]hen you find those stories that really speak to you, you know, they're healing you in fundamental ways. And they're nourishing your soul and letting you know that you're allowed to be more than histories of oppression, essentially.
And so I'm less complex-spells and complicated rituals and really expensive tools, and ingredients. And I'm more thinking about how powerful our thoughts are, how powerful our energy and intention is. And really thinking, you know, if I want to create this narrative of happiness, if I want that everyday magic, I need to look at the ordinary gothic first. I need to find the places in my life that feel dark or oppressive. And I need to untangle that and figure out what's causing that. Once I kind of work through those things, then the magic follows. Our energy opens up, we can get really grounded about what we want our day-in, day-out to look like. So I talked about making routines and turning them into rituals, right? So we're not just on autopilot, we're thinking intentionally about how we want to live our daily life.
… I like to frame it in terms of actual storytelling, because I believe in story magic. I do think these stories, you know, the books and the stories we’re attracted to give us a lot of medicine, and healing through simply following the heroine’s journey or the hero's journey.
So when I explain brujeria to people, or my version of practicing it, I think of it as centering yourself as the protagonist in your own life, right? If your story was a book, what would you want it to look like? What would you want to be there? What would the setting be?
And then you can slowly start building it from there. And it sounds sort of silly or corny, but it's a really beautiful way of saying, “If I'm the author of my own life, how do I want to script this? How do I want to shape this?”
And it's amazing what happens when you just start directing your attention, the synchronous events that will keep guiding you to a more joyful way of living and really helping open up to the profound possibility.
—
Happy Halloween weekend, friends - are you inspired by Dr. DeBlassie’s closing words and insights about finding “profound possibility” through story, and finding a way forward from a difficult path, whatever that might involve, into empowerment, magic, ritual, and joy, through story? Are you a reader of romance novels, and have they gotten you through tough times?
You can comment here and let us know!
You can also reach out to us at [email protected], and please find us on twitter at @AustenConnect and on Insta and Facebook at @austenconnection.
Do you know anyone who might love to hear about this combination of witchery, everyday magic, and romance stories, and Jane Austen? If so, invite a friend into our community by sharing this post!
Meanwhile, have a magical, wonderful Halloween weekend, and stay in touch with us here at the Austen Connection.
Yours affectionately,
Plain Jane
Cool links
* Dr. Maria DeBlassie’s website: https://mariadeblassie.com/
* Practically Pagan: An Alternative Guide to Magical Living and other books by Maria DeBlassie: https://mariadeblassie.com/publications
Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe -
Dear Jane friends,
It’s Tuesday, and not our usual Thursday, because we have something special for you: Today, we are kicking off a second season of the podcast! We have some amazing conversations lined up for you, dropping on Thursdays over the next few weeks - so make sure you are signed up for this newsletter, and each conversation will drop right into your inbox. You can listen right here (click Play!) or find the podcast on Spotify or Apple.
And today, we interrupt our October month of horrors for a romantic, soulful interlude … about Jane Austen’s most romantic, soulful story.
We’re talking with playwright Sarah Rose Kearns, an actor, Janeite, and playwright whose adaptation of Persuasion is showing in an Off-Broadway production through the end of the month.
We recently spoke with Kearns for this Christian Science Monitor piece, and when we caught up with her by Zoom on a recent Saturday night she told us she feels like Anne Elliot has been her imaginary friend for half her life.
Can we relate, friends?
It seems to me like many of us feel - like biographer Claire Tomalin told us she does - that Austen’s characters are indeed our intimate friends. And have been for a very long time, if we’re lucky.
As a writer, Sarah Rose Kearns has an answer to why this is: She attributes this intimacy partly to Austen’s literary technique known as “free indirect discourse,” which takes us right into the mind of the character.
My very favorite part of this conversation might be the part about the music included in Kearns’s stage play - including the folk song “The Saucy Sailor,” featuring in this episode a version of the ditty by Canadian folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys.
Kearns also talked about some of our favorite themes of Jane Austen that come out strong in Persuasion - such as the feeling not only of longing and loss, but also of displacement, abandonment, and what Kearns called “the quest for a stable home.”
Enjoy this Austen Connection podcast episode with Sarah Rose Kearns on taking Jane Austen’s most heartbreaking, soulful, most painful and pining, and deeply romantic story - and putting all that on stage.
And, friends, tell us:
What is your favorite theme in the story of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth? What is your favorite part of the novel - is it The Letter? Do you feel that Anne Elliot is the perfect imaginary friend? And what did you think of The Wailin Jennys’ version of “The Saucy Sailor” featured in this episode?
Does anyone out there plan to be at the play, at Bedlam theater in NYC? The Austen Connection will be there on Friday, Oct. 22, for the TalkBack - come by and see us!
And, watch for brand new Season 2 podcast episodes, dropping on Thursdays! Coming up: author Vanessa Riley about her latest book Island Queen, author Uzma Jalaluddin on her Pride and Prejudice retelling Ayesha at Last, Damianne Scott on her own retelling of Persuasion and her popular Facebook page “Black Girl Loves Jane,” and next week a special Halloween edition that continues our October month of Horrors, with Professor Maria De Blassey, about ordinary gothic, everyday magic, romance, and what it all has to do with Jane Austen - that’s next Thursday!
Sign up for the newsletter, and all these conversations arrive right to your inbox.
And meanwhile, friends, stay healthy, warm, and happy, and stay in touch with us at the Austen Connection.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
If you liked this post, feel free to share it, friend!
Cool Links:
* The Persuasion play website: https://www.janeaustenspersuasion.com/
* The current Bedlam production website: https://bedlam.org/persuasion/
* Jocelyn Harris’s book A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’: https://www.jocelynharris.co.nz/work/revolution-almost-beyond-expression-jane-austens-persuasion/
* Paula Byrne’s The Genius of Jane Austen, about Jane Austen and the theater: https://paulabyrne.com/books/
* Here’s the Andrew Davies talk at Chapman University that is mentioned in this conversation:
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Hello friends,
Today, a podcast episode!
It would not have been possible to have our Everything Emma month here at the Austen Connection without consulting Professor George Justice.
Dr. Justice is the editor of the 2011 Norton Critical Edition of Emma, a professor of 18th Century British literature, and a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education. And he’s also the husband of Austen scholar, author, and friend Devoney Looser, who tells the story of their romantic meet-cute in a previous Austen Connection episode.
Consult him we did, and the conversation was really fun, because: Emma is fun, just as it is also complex, surprising, baffling, and romantic.
All of this complexity comes out in the conversation with George Justice. We explore what’s going on with Austen men, what’s going on with Austen women, and how romance and power get wrapped up in the stories of Austen.
I first met Dr. Justice on the campus of the University of Missouri, where he served as dean of the graduate school. Now, he is a professor of English at Arizona State University. But in the process of that journey, from Missouri to Arizona, and from administration back to the classroom, he rediscovered the power of teaching Jane Austen.
This journey also has involved a recovery from a serious illness, and Dr. Justice says one of the things that got him through tough times has been reading Jane Austen, and talking about Jane Austen with his students.
We spoke on a recent sunny Saturday, by Zoom. Here’s an edited excerpt from our conversation:
*Please note: There is a light mention of sexual assault in this conversation, about 20 minutes in, and again at 40 about minutes.
Plain Jane
I'm so glad that you're sharing your beautiful Saturday morning.
Let me just ask a little bit about your work, George. So you're obviously on English literature with a focus on women's writing and publishing. And you're writing a book on Jane Austen, as a writer for Reaktion Books, the “Critical Lives” series. You also write about higher education, very compellingly, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
What, in all of this, are you most focused on and most passionate about, like, right this minute?
George Justice
I can't say there is one thing because you're right, you just outlined the two major threads of my career as they've evolved. They both involve students, higher education, and places where I think I can contribute.
But on the literature side, it feels like a miracle to me to be able to write about Jane Austen, to do research on Jane Austen, and especially, to teach Jane Austen to undergraduate students, which I can't imagine a more enjoyable thing that I can pretend is productive for myself to do.
But my most recently published book is How to Be a Dean from the Johns Hopkins University Press.
So figuring out ways, outside of administration, to take my passion for higher education to make structural change, structural change that is also focused on the individual.
And I think that's something that maybe I'll be able to bring back to a discussion of the novels, genre, and to teaching. I love thinking about what the novel is. But what I also love is what it means to individual human beings to change their lives and do great things in the world.
Plain Jane
George, you said something else, about your illness, which you handled, it seemed, so gracefully. But I know that it's been huge. And in some ways, you were hit by this turn-the-world-upside-down thing. And then the world itself was turned upside down, not too long later. So in some ways, we're all kind of stunned. But you look the picture of health, and it's so great to see it. What were you reading during this time? Can Jane Austen get you through something like that?
George Justice
To me, it was therapeutic. It was therapeutic not only to reread her books, and to dig back in, more generally, to 18th century literature, but I was a little shaky, you know, I had been very sick. I had not from my own choice been thrust out of a job that I had spent 70 hours working on actively, and the rest of my life kind of thinking about, when I got into the classroom, and started teaching Jane Austen again.
And it was absolutely life-changing. And I realized, that is what the life of an educator should be. And it was really … a life-changing class for me, not only because it marked kind of re-entry into a different kind of career: But the students were so shockingly great to me. To me, having these students in that class, loving Jane Austen and understanding things about Jane Austen, was transformational in my understanding about what the rest of my life and the rest of my career are going to be. I can bring together a complete passion for bringing Jane Austen not just to white, upper-middle class students at a private liberal arts college, but at Arizona State University, 120,000 students. It's now a Hispanic serving institution. It serves many, many first generation and low-income students, and they love Jane Austen. Not only with as much passion, but with at least as much insight as any students I've ever had anywhere else in my life. That class changed my life, when I had these students engaging with such depth and brilliance with the texts.
Plain Jane
That's amazing. I hear you George, I think that's true. It is life changing. And this project arose also from the difficult times, the winter of the pandemic, and just looking for something to lift you up and a community to engage in. What you're describing, going into that classroom, sharing Austen, but then also having some brilliance shared back at you and just literally connecting around the stories.
But you know, the Norton Anthology that you edited and curated came out almost 20 years ago. And you may have not looked at it recently. I have. But you were talking about the power of Jane Austen, then, so it's Everything Emma in the Austen connection right now.
George Justice
Good for me.
Plain Jane
Yes. Well, is Emma your favorite novel of all time?
George Justice
Oh, that is a a very difficult question. And I know because you talked to Devoney and you had Devoney on your podcast a couple of weeks ago. In that now infamous conversation, I declared to Devoney that Mansfield Park was my favorite novel. And I do love Mansfield Park … because it was the first one that grabbed me. I mean, I was assigned it in a class my first year of grad school. I didn't read it until then, and I started reading it and it was just one of those amazing things, but my life was changed: How could I not have seen this or understood this in my past 22 years of life? I stayed up all night reading it, and it was like an onslaught. If you ask me, yes, that was my favorite.
Plain Jane
Well, I'm just curious. It seems to me like you were a more mature 22 year old. I mean, I read Mansfield Park when I was just out of college. Weirdly, I've never been assigned much Jane Austen at all. I just discovered it after all of the degrees - it was only two degrees - in English. … It wasn't until later that I realized there's a heck of a lot going on with Austen. What were you noticing? Why were you reading it up late at night? I mean … I had kind of a weird education, up until college. But you had a good education. So maybe you did have the training to spot the subtexts.
George Justice
I don't know if it was about the subtext. I think it was about Fanny Price.
Plain Jane
You like the underdog! Devoney said this …
George Justice
The underdog and the person with depth, with a strong, correct, and unassailable moral code, oppressed by the world.
I mean, that was a thing that just for whatever reason, maybe, from my high school years, which were kind of miserable, the person who was neglected. I mean, it just spoke to me, this whole world moving around in a cynical and nasty way. And yet, there's a moral center to that world, which was Fanny Price.
So it wasn't even, it was not a literary reading, where I was looking at themes and context. It was Fanny Price. Who is, as you know, of such huge controversy in the Jane Austen world, because there are so many self-proclaimed Janeites who hate Fanny Price. To me, Fanny Price is the true center of Jane Austen. Which is why I found the film both interesting and disturbing, because Patricia Rozema melds Jane Austen and Fanny Price together, which I think actually weakens Fanny Price.
But I do believe that the role of Fanny Price in the world, and especially in her world, is a truth about the social world. And it grabbed me.
To me, Fanny Price is the true center of Jane Austen. … I do believe that the role of Fanny Price in the world, and especially in her world, is a truth about the social world. And it grabbed me.
And the unbelievable moment when she turns down Henry Crawford. I always bring it up in class and I ask my students, “Should she have accepted Henry Crawford?” And the ones who read it correctly but glibly, always say, “Of course not.” The ones who are very cynical say, “Of course she should.” The real answer is, “I don't know.” Because that actually is the answer that the narrator provides to some extent. I just thought it captured a truth about the choices we have to make in the world, and the possibility of choosing good, not as an obvious choice, and not as a glibly self-justifying choice. But as a choice that resonates as truth within one's own moral complexity.
Plain Jane
I agree with everything you're saying about Fanny Price. … She is ascendant. And you talk about Henry Crawford: She's superior. Like, you can't read that without thinking, “This child, this female child of the species, is superior to everyone. What are you gonna do with that, people? What are you going to do with that? Not even the parsonage and Edmund and not even the grand estate of Mansfield Park is worthy of this child. So, take that!” And I don't know if people really see it that way. You say it's still a little controversial. But you saw this when you were 22?
George Justice
Well, I think it was a weakness in my psychology.
Plain Jane
No, because Austen was showing you. Austen was showing you. But we just, I feel like there's still so much to unpack with Austen with every new generation.
George Justice
And she shows it to you both without humiliating her and without glorifying her. So, as you were talking so eloquently, what came into my mind [is] another woman author of the 19th century, George Eliot and Middlemarch and Dorothea Brooke, and Dorothea Brooke is both humiliated and glorified.
You are right, Fanny Price tears everything down. The humiliations are our humiliations from society, not from the writer. I mean, Dorothea Brooke is somewhat humiliated by George Eliot. Jane Austen never humiliates Fanny Price, even if Mrs. Norris is there brutalizing her, but she’s definitely not glorifying her either. Fanny Price comes back, and in some ways you could say she assimilates herself to the patriarchy, she marries her cousin, the bossy Edmund - I don't even think he even fully 100% appreciates her but maybe that's just me. I think I would have been better for Fanny Price than he is.
Plain Jane
You would have, George! And no, Austen does not want us to love Edmund, you know? That's clear. She does not love Edmund. We’re giving our opinions here! So let us know, people, if you disagree. But yeah, but I love what you're saying, George, that Austen is not humiliating. And in fact, it's not really Fanny tearing things down. Right? Fanny is not doing that; Austen is doing that. And the world is humiliating. The world is full of humiliations, insults, injuries. And here's how you stand. Here's how you stand in this.
You point out something in your writing that I want to get to too, which is that there's imagination. This is, in some ways, a fantasy of what can happen. This is re-envisioning a world where a young woman, a young person who identifies as female, a young person who identifies as however you identify, whatever your race, color, sexuality, gender, you - just as a human - you can stand, and this is how you might survive and maybe even be ascendant. Even though it's not necessarily going to happen in real life.
So, Mansfield Park. The next novel Austen wrote, I believe, right after Emma. How does she go from Fanny Price to this heroine that has so little to vex her?
George Justice
When you look at Mansfield Park, which is certainly an experiment in light of Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, and a novelist who is a genius and who is shaping the form and breaking the form at the same time that she's inhabiting it. In a way it's the right next experiment.
You take somebody who's very much unlike Fanny Price. She's wealthy. She's beautiful. She's admired. She never makes social mistakes. Really. She is the queen of the world, as opposed to Cinderella. So Fanny Price is Cinderella. Emma is one of the wicked sisters. Yet, and the brilliant ... “I'm going to create a heroine nobody but myself will much like”: That's something an artist would do. It's a kind of intellectual game. But unlike the way postmodern novels sometimes [create] experiments without a heart. It's an experiment in which life overwhelms whatever kind of intellectual experiment may have given rise, to trying to write about an entirely different character, because there is just as much life in Emma, as there is in Mansfield Park. And there is in its own way, just as much integrity in the character of Emma, as there is in the character Fanny Price.
Plain Jane
It's interesting because she's taking us on this roller coaster ride. So she's like, “Here, I showed you the poor, mousy Cinderella, who becomes ascendent. How does that happen? Now I'm going to show you somebody who - as you say, George - the queen, she's at the top. But she also is going to change and evolve. And in both cases, she's focusing on what matters to her, which is character, and kindness, and how to exist in the world - not to just be on top because that's not the goal, people - we’re still getting that memo. But it's to be a contributor, a good citizen, a kind person. How do you feel about that, that aspect of this, that she's got someone on the bottom there, she's got a female character that's already at the top. But yet, what are the themes that remained the same?
George Justice
Well, I think you actually just put it in a way that crystallizes something for me. And it's what I become much more self-conscious about … in life: which is that kindness is at the core. And so that's not something that I wrote about in the introduction that you very kindly mentioned, to the Norton Critical Edition. But it is something that is absolutely true. And I point out to students, you know, [Emma] does what she's supposed to do. She visits the poor, she's charitable to the poor. And that's the kind of structural kindness, and she doesn't do it cynically. So there is a goodness to her character that gets expressed. And kindness. Of course, as we know, she's not always kind to some of the people that are closest to her, including Miss Bates, including Jane Fairfax. … One of the prevalent readings of Emma continues to be that Emma is … humiliated into kindness. The scene on Box Hill, where she is so cruel to Miss Bates, and so out of touch with her surroundings, because one thing about Emma is that she is unbelievably … perceptive about the world around her, at the same time that she doesn't put all the clues together. So she's this detective who's taking in all the evidence, and then she can't quite put it together to understand what's going on. Like Mr. Elton trying to rape her in the carriage - when anybody who had been reading it, anybody in Emma's position should have been able to see exactly what was happening. But that's very different from Box Hill, where she's not even perceptive. … But at the same time, that is a crucial moment in which she certainly sees the world more clearly and is able to correlate her kindness as you put it, this is correlated with her role in the social hierarchy, and her own personal satisfaction and romance. And it doesn't stamp out her imagination. Her imagination is still there. … No, she's a brilliantly imaginative person who doesn't have a job where she can do anything with it. …
I love Mr. Knightley. But Emma, Emma wins the novel. And she wins novel not because she makes some sort of cynical or moral change from who she was, to who she will be as Mrs. George Knightley. It's because she has reshaped her world - uncomfortably because we're still in patriarchal, early 19th century England. But she shaped a world in which she can continue to love, be kind, have a lot of nice things, be admired by other people, which she certainly loves to do. And do good in the world.
Plain Jane
So speaking of Knightley: You love Knightley. You say something in your intro [to the Norton Critical Edition]: Emma is being forced to recalibrate the cultural and the social hierarchy. She thinks she knows this social hierarchy. She has that classic definition of privilege, where it's not something she has to think about. She's just at the top of it. But she in fact is wrong about it, and then it turns out - you point this out - she's recalibrating, but that recalibration is coming every single time from challenges from Knightley. How does a romance and marriage and all of this fit into this recalibration and what is it like, also George, reading this as as a person identifying as a man reading that?
George Justice
Hmm, let me backtrack a little bit into how you've set this up in a very interesting, complicated way. It is Austen who has given Knightley those characteristics and that genuine insight into the world. Mr. Knightley really does understand and he's older - I mean, it grosses my students out how significantly older Mr. Knightley is. And he's kind to her and he's loved her since - that also grosses out the students ...
Plain Jane
… for some reason Austen likes that older, very older, powerful guy to be the one just kind of showing us the way. I mean, she gives that power, and who knows why she does that.
George Justice
But it's not just giving him the power. It's also, I do believe, he is speaking for her. He is speaking correctly. The brilliant, writer, critic named Sarah Raff wrote a wonderful essay that talks about Emma and Mr. Knightley and Emma's relationship in the context of the letters of advice that Jane Austen is writing to her niece, who's trying to decide whom to marry. And there is a bullying, authoritative voice and approach to her niece, that mirrors a little bit of this relationship. It's a it's a great essay about it.
Emma wins the novel. … because she has reshaped her world - uncomfortably because we're still in patriarchal, early 19th century England. But she shaped a world in which she can continue to love, be kind, have a lot of nice things, be admired by other people, which she certainly loves to do. And do good in the world.
Plain Jane
If you're a woman, Regency writer, you're a genius, and you see the world and you're reflecting the world, there'll be some things that … occur when you have genius and imagination and art intersecting, right? Some things are going to occur to us 206 years later that you didn't envision, but … she's giving Knightley her viewpoints because people will listen to Knightley. People will listen to Knightley and not necessarily listen to someone else.
George Justice
And maybe in a romantic relationship - this is utter speculation! - she'd be more the Knightley character. And so you know, we do have these interesting intersections of gender, power and attraction.
Plain Jane
I love that we don't know how Jane Austen identified 100%. We have no idea. She may have identified with Knightley, she might have been in love with Emma, she might have ... Who knows? I think that's wonderful. And that's a whole other aspect we could dive into which is the LGBTQI critical approaches and queer theory approaches to Austen.
Really the question we were discussing, sorry, is how it all ends up in the hands of Knightley, but also how to channel all of this into romance?
George Justice
Oh, yeah. I mean, because it is romantic. And I know there are some against-the-grain readers who don't find the love between Emma and Mr. Knightley plausible. I am not one of them. I find the scene - and it's a scene in which despite the fact that Mr. Knightley has just dressed her down and made her weep - the narrative is constructed so that Emma is allowed in private to have her moment of internal revelation that no one but she must marry Mr. Knightley. And then she also finally, instead of being clueless, she figures out that he likes her. So in that, it is a, to me, it's a wonderful thing. When he he starts, you know, “Can I talk to you?” And Emma’s a little nervous. Because she doesn't 100% know. But as the conversation gets going, she knows exactly what's coming. And so the power is turned. Emma actually knows before he knows that Mr. Knightley is going to propose to her and that she will say yes. Before Mr. Knightley understands that. And so he's, like, mortified: I shouldn't go on. And she's like: No, no, go ahead and go on. And it's an interesting power dynamic. And I'm certainly not the person who's seen this first or seen it best. Claudia Johnson's [written] about Mr. Knightley as a character who is very masculine. And yet he's a kind of new man, because he is truly emotionally sensitive to Emma.
[I]t is romantic. And I know there are some against-the-grain readers who don't find the love between Emma and Mr. Knightley plausible. I am not one of them.
What is interesting in the romance is that power is so completely built into the sexual energy between Mr. Knightley and Emma. He was a teenager, looking at a little girl. And as they grew up, he would kind of mock her and tease her. And she'd flirt with him, totally unafraid of this older guy, really. So I mean, she was herself, who really has the power there? And … in the context of Box Hill, where he really has, you know, put his hand down, if you reread the novel from the beginning, Mr. Knightley doesn't have really any power over her. He has her total respect, but she has the power of doing what she wants. And that really is what comes through at the end - that this powerful romance, which I think it is not a kind of dominance-submission thing. It is really a romance of two morally and intellectually equal people. They are very masculine and very feminine - it's interesting if you get into the GLBTQ thing, because there is a long history of people seeing Emma not as being a woman. But we shouldn't forget that it's very clear … and Jan Fergus points this out really beautifully in an essay that I put at the back of my Norton Critical Edition: We linger over the feminine, beautiful form of Emma. But her mind is powerfully intellectual. … Even as it’s kind. She is a kind, intellectually brilliant person who answers to nobody. So where you might see it as, “She makes all these lists of books that she hasn't read!” … That shows her power. She has the intellectual power to know what she should do. And she has the intellectual power and the judgment to say, “I'm not going to do it.” And is happy to live within the structures, the class structures, the social structures, the architectural structures of her society. But she kind of scoffs at any structures that would restrain her moral and intellectual worth.
Plain Jane
Well, it's almost like she doesn't even notice those structures. She's like, clueless in some interesting ways.
George Justice
Yes, but I, but I don't think it's clueless overall. … She's clear-sighted and not insecure. She's totally non-insecure. It's kind of amazing.
Plain Jane
Well, it's interesting describing her power. It's true. Like you say, Austen's not humiliating these characters with Emma, she's doing the opposite. She's showing someone who is not only superior, but she's artificially superior. Emma's so powerful, she can be as wrong as the Eltons and the, you know, all of the wrong patriarchal figures. Emma's wrong and artificially propped up just like they are. But she has this transformation that comes from this this man. .. There was a little post I did called The Smartest Person in the Room. ...I feel like maybe Austen wanted someone, man/woman/person to be as smart as she was. That's a hard way to go through the world when marriage is your option. Who is going to be smart enough for Jane Austen? She didn't find it. She created stories with people who find it. But at the same time, obviously, she showed us so much more than that romance.
George Justice
That’s sad! And it's very true.
Let's go through from the beginning: I'm just going to ask you. Do you think Mr. Darcy is worthy of Elizabeth Bennet?
Plain Jane
Yes, I believe that. It seems to me like Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett make each other worthy of each other. It seems to me like the both characters You want to just focus on Darcy and Elizabeth for a minute?
George Justice
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to go through the whole list.
Plain Jane
Externally, he's worthy, right? He's a ticket. Internally, not so much. But because he transforms, they make each other better. I feel like they make each other better. And I feel like Austin is showing us that marriage - if you're going to get married, make sure it's somebody who will make you better and not make you worse. And she's full of examples of people who make each other worse.
George Justice
The Crofts. Admiral and Mrs. Croft make each other better.
Plain Jane
And are they the only ones?!
George Justice
They probably are. I want to go [through the list] because I think this is something I haven't thought of. We already said that Edmund really isn't worthy of Fanny. But Darcy is worthy of Elizabeth.
Would you say that Edward is worthy of Elinor.
Plain Jane
Almost! He has potential. That little engagement on the side is extremely disappointing. But he needs to speak up. He needs to grow a spine. But he has potential Maybe with Elinor's extremely strong spine, those two will be all right. What do you think?
George Justice
I don't think he's worthy of her. But he's whom she chose. And he's not terrible. That's like Edmund. It's, that's who Fanny wanted and he's not terrible. I'd say the same thing about Henry Tilney. Catherine Morland’s not as fully developed a character. But he's, he's not a bad guy.
We linger over the feminine, beautiful form of Emma. But her mind is powerfully intellectual. … Even as it’s kind. She is a kind, intellectually brilliant person who answers to nobody.
But if you take Mr. Darcy, and you take Captain Wentworth, and you take, Mr. Knightley, those are characters who embody - as I said, Claudia Johnson talks about it - these new men who are masculine and powerful, and yet have a sensitive intelligence to them, as well. And respect and value deeply the women that they're with. … This conversation has made me want to think about that. And why the last two, thinking about Persuasion, and Emma, the last two of those powerful men are truly worthy, I think. And you know, of course, I think the moment at the end of that letter, in Persuasion, is one of the most intense things. But I know a colleague who thinks it's camp, that it's purposely overdone. I don't believe that at all. I think it's one of the most beautiful things ever written in the English language.
Plain Jane
It's so beautiful. I love your categorizing all these leading men, who's worthy, who's not. It's really interesting. You, okay, I had to pick up the Norton Edition, Claudia Johnson. Here's what she says: She says Knightley is “a fantastically wishful creation of benign authority, in whom the benefits and attractions of power are preserved, and the abuses and encroachments expelled.” So what do you think is going on with that as you categorize the leading men? That's Claudia Johnson's Knightley, wrapped up in power.
George Justice
And because authority and power are inherently not wrong things in these books. When I'm teaching classes, I bring it back to the authority and the power of the narrator, who is the actual authority and power in all of these novels. And I think that's partly why the turn from an epistolary novel, where, you know, it's harder to weld that to increasingly intense narrative strategies that express their authority, often by merging the voice through free indirect discourse, with the voice of the main character. So it is such a trick to have the most fully controlling and authoritative and benign narrators who efface themselves and express their authority and power, almost through their own self effacement.
Plain Jane
Let me George, read your own writing back to you, because this is so amazing. And it just kind of sums up everything that we said, and I have this kind of as our last question. You write almost 20 years ago in your introduction to the Norton Critical Edition. Here's what you wrote: “Reading Emma requires interaction. We impose meaning on the text just as the text pushes its various meanings on to us. Trying to understand Emma, with its interplay of psychological realism and moral vision, is like trying to understand ourselves and the world. We must be both introspective and exceedingly observant of what lies around us. Complete success eludes us. We must reread, reflect and change our minds, and perhaps become better people for having done so.” I almost cried when I read that!
George Justice
That's very kind (laughing). I can't believe I wrote that. It does sound pretty good.
Plain Jane
My question for you with that is, Do you still think that? Twenty years later, almost 20 years later?
George Justice
Yeah. And that's an interesting thing I do. And it's an interesting thing, and it's humbling about teaching, and it's a wonderful thing about teaching. Like any teacher, when I teach a novel a lot of times, like I do with Emma, I have go-to points, I have shticks. I have different scenes I like to focus on. … So I'm, you know, leading, I like to talk about the carriage theme, for example, and I do have a strong reading, and Mr. Elton is basically raping Emma, and I want students to see the actual violence that is in that scene. It isn't just the sloppy, silly guy who is physically menacing in that space and in the way that he approached.
But then students will say, “Well, I read it in this way.” And any good teacher has to be able to say, “Wow, I hadn't thought about that.” Just as your focusing on just your use of the word kindness, and putting that deeply into our conversation about Emma. I had not articulated it to myself in that way before. That's new to me. And I can tell you, I'm going to be thinking about that for months to come.
So I do believe that every time I read this book, it's a new book to me. She's constructed the books so carefully that it's impossible to understand even what's happening, 20 times through the book, for me. And then when you add the increased complexity of how human beings interact with each other, and how the fixed and unfixed parts of their personality come into this complicated matrix of interaction.
Yeah, it's a new book every time. And it's a new book that is morally compelling. Because it tells us to look at everything anew.
Thanks for joining this conversation, friends.
As always, let us know your thoughts on: Austen’s men - who’s Worthy and who’s Not Worthy? Who makes your list? What are your thoughts on Emma, Knightley, and the power dynamics in Austen’s romances?
You can comment here!
You can also find us on Twitter, at @AustenConnect and on Insta at @austenconnection.
Meanwhile, stay in touch, and hope you enjoy a beautiful autumn with soups, teas, and lots of great novels.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
If you liked this post, feel free to share it!
Links:
* “Critical Lives” series - Reaktion Books: http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/results.asp?SF1=series_exact&ST1=CRITICALLIVES&DS=Critical%20Lives&SORT=sort_title
* The Norton Critical Edition of Emma: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393927641
* More on scholar and critic Claudia Johnson: https://english.princeton.edu/people/claudia-l-johnson
* Dever Justice LLC: https://deverjustice.com/about/
* How to Be a Dean - from Johns Hopkins University Press: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/how-be-dean
Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe -
Hello dear friends,
Welcome to another week of The Austen Connection and our sixth podcast episode, which you can stream from right here, or from Apple or Spotify!
And this episode features a conversation with Austen scholar and Janeite Devoney Looser - who for many of you captures the spirit and vibe of Jane Austen’s stories in her work and in her life:
Looser has dedicated so much of her life to connecting through literature and Jane Austen, from her books, her teaching, her many appearances at conferences and at Janeite and JASNA gatherings, and also in her personal life through her marriage to Austen scholar George Justice and her roller derby career as Stone Cold Jane Austen.
These days Devoney Looser is working on a new book, due out from Bloomsbury next year: Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter in the Age of Austen explores two sister novelists writing, innovating, and breaking rules in the Regency and Victorian eras.
Devoney Looser is also the author of The Making of Jane Austen.
And - full transparency here - I’m lucky enough to call Devoney Looser a friend. We met as professors on a campus in Missouri. So this is a continuation of conversations that Devoney and I have had for years. We got together by Zoom a few weeks ago and talked about many things, including the first time she read Austen, how an Austen argument was the foundation of her first conversation with her husband, and how - just like Jane Austen - Devoney straddles the worlds of both high culture and pop culture.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. Enjoy!
Plain Jane: So let me just start if you don't mind with a couple of just questions about your personal Austen journey. What Austen did you first read? When did you discover Austen? Do you remember which book? And which time and place?
Devoney Looser: Absolutely. And this is a question that I really enjoy. It's a kind of conversion question, right? … So I love that this is where we start … I do have my awakening moment. And your awakening, I think this is a common story for a lot of Janeites, which is why the story resonates. It was my mother, who handed me a copy of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice bound together. I now have this book. It was a Modern Library edition of both of those novels that was published in the ‘50s. And she handed it to me because … she knew I was a reader, she knew I loved to read. And she said, “Here's one that I think you should read.”
We had books from her childhood, or from church book sales in our house, we had a lot of books in our house. And I started to try to read it. And I really stumbled because I could not get at the language. But she was insistent, she kept kind of putting it toward me, and saying, “I think you should read this one.” And I think it was maybe around the third time I tried it - Pride and Prejudice is what I started with - it just really took. You know, it was like, Oh, wait this is kind of funny. And I like these characters. And I like the story.
So after I got my PhD, I learned that my mother had actually never read Pride and Prejudice before. And to me that actually made her giving it to me even more meaningful. She is not college educated. She wanted me to have an education. And the idea that novels could be handed down from mothers to daughters, even mothers without an education, to say, “Here's a way for you to have access to more opportunities,” is what the books are about too, in a way, right? I mean, the mothers aren't always the ones doing it in the books. In fact, they're often not. But the books are functioning as that opening up - worlds opening up possibilities and opening up education, self actualization. You know that this is to me meaningful that my mother knew that this is a book that educated girls should read, and that she wanted it for me.
Plain Jane: She was tapping into something that she hadn't had herself and just trying to give that to you. That's awesome. So you're a professor, scholar, writer. … What attracts you to the conversations about Jane Austen, and teaching Jane Austen?
Devoney Looser: I think the thing about Austen that keeps me coming back to her is how readable she is. And lots of people say this in the critical community and the Janeite community like the scholars and JASNA. I think even anyone who picks her up casually having not read her in 20 years or never read it before, there's a complexity there on the level of the sentences, paragraph, plot, that is really, to me. enriching, or generative - it generates ideas.
And every time I go back to the books, I see something new. every age, every experience that I've made it through, gives me a new way into those sentences. And there are a lot of books that we love, but that we can't really imagine rereading with the same level of love, I think. And for me, that makes Austen just really remarkable. The idea that you can go back to her, you know, every year. A lot of people who love her books read her every year, all six every year. Do you know that joke from Gilbert Ryle, the philosopher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked, this is a century ago, asked, “Sir, do you do you read novels?” And he said, “Yes, I do, all six every year.” So this is this is a good Janeite in-joke, that the only novels there are these six? Obviously not true. … But the relatability is how I would I would answer that.
Plain Jane: So I mean, Jane Austen can be, like you say, kind of adapted to your life as you go through different things in life. But you, with The Making of Jane Austen have really documented how not only individuals can adapt Jane Austen to their lives, but movements can adapt Jane Austen to their causes and ... we see that in kind of exciting ways. Can you talk a little bit about why her? Why are her novels so adaptable throughout the last couple of hundred years?
Devoney Looser: So I know you know this, I talked about this in The Making of Jane Austen about the ways that various people have very different political persuasions find a reflection of their values or questions or concerns in her novels. So she has been used to argue opposing sides of political questions for 150 years and probably longer. I think this was partly to do with the fact that her novels and her fiction open up questions more often than they close them. And I think it's her relationship to the didactic tradition in her day, the moralizing tradition. I think she's really stepping outside of that and more interested in gray areas, than in declaring what's right and what's wrong. So I think this is a beautiful, complex thing about her novels and they’re novels of genius, to my mind, and I'm not afraid to use that word. But they also present certain kinds of really interesting challenges, because you can't go to them and say, “What should I think?” They don't really answer that question for you in a clear away. I think in other kinds of didactic fiction where there's a clear moral outcome, this person's punished with death, or, you know, or some kind of tragic outcome, or this person's rewarded, and it's all going to be, you know, happily ever after, and nothing ever is going to go wrong. Her novels are working outside of that to some degree. So I do think that that's one reason why people have very different experiences and political persuasions and motivations, come to her novels, and it can be kind of like a Rorschach test, right? You can see what you want to see in the designs to some degree. Now, I do think people can get it wrong, I think you can find there are arguments that people make that I think there is absolutely no textual evidence for that whatsoever. But oftentimes, I can look at someone coming to a conclusion that might be different from the one that I reached, and say, Well, I see where you can get that from emphasizing this point, more than this one, or seeing this passage as the crucial one, instead of another passage.
I think this is a beautiful, complex thing about her novels and they’re novels of genius, to my mind, and I'm not afraid to use that word. But they also present certain kinds of really interesting challenges, because you can't go to them and say, “What should I think?” They don't really answer that question for you in a clear away.
Plain Jane It's also occurring to me listening to you Devoney, that she sort of makes people think, in ways that might be uncomfortable. She must be one of the few novelists that can actually draw you to her story, draw you in and draw you to that narrator. But also be uncomfortable, maybe with what she's giving you. And maybe we just stepped around the discomfort some of us. Do you think that's an accurate way of thinking about Jane Austen as well?
Devoney Looser: I think that's beautifully put. And, you know, I think too we can read her novels on many different levels. If you say, I want to go into this for a love story, that's funny, with a happy ending, which is what many people who read in the romance genre know the formula, and they're going to it because they like the formula. And it might have different things in different component parts. But you know that at the end you're not going to be distressed and dealing with something tragic, right? So when you go into an Austen novel, the kinds of discomfort you're describing, that they will be there along with something happy, too. So I think you could just read it for the happy ending. [But] I see that as a real lost opportunity. Because I think the happy endings are tacked on from genre expectation about comedies. If you're focusing on the happy ending, you're missing all the important stuff that's happening all along the way. And that's the uncomfortable stuff, right? The stuff about family conflict, economics, all of the kinds of ways that people are terrible to each other, that are, maybe borderline criminal or actually criminal. But everything below that, too. That's more mundane, the way that people mistreat each other. That is wrong. It's not criminal. And that, to me, is what makes these novels uncomfortable, is that even those people who are doing terrible things, usually get away with it.
Plain Jane: Hmm, yes. If you said to people, Here's a novel about the insult and injury endured by women because of class and gender - and possibly you can add race and disability and a lot of other boundaries in there” - I don't know how many people would see that as Jane Austen. But there's that subtext. … The more I read and reread Jane Austen and just stay really close to the text, the more I find myself relying on Gilbert and Gubar and their “cover story.” And it's, you know, I read that a long time ago. So it's probably influencing my reading, I say close to the text, but it's close to the text that's very influenced by what I already have read of you, and is it Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar…. How much do you think she was consciously or even unconsciously saying stuff? In all that meandering, within that courtship plot and then within that happy ending plot that you just described? How much do you think was going on with that cover story?
Devoney Looser: So I want to first start with the end of this, which is to say, I think every sentence is saying something else. You know, and not like it's a secret ...I think there are there are people who will say that this is a code for a completely other world below the surface. I'm not sure that I would go there. But I do think that these are novels that are trying to get us to investigate not only who the characters are, but who we are. And sonthere's always something else going on in any human conversation. There's always something else going on. And I think she captures that in the conversations among her characters, that they can be having the same conversation but with such varying motivations that you can see it and it becomes humorous. You know, Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, talking to Mrs. Allen, about Catherine Morland’s chaperone about muslin, that whole conversation about clothing and shopping. You can read that as a love of fashion, you can read it as an indictment of consumer culture, you can read it as a kind of gender cosplay, or you can use it as an indictment of femininity. I mean, there's just so many different levels within the same conversation and you can try to understand how these characters are arguing with each other. So I think in some ways, what you're getting at is, Yes, there's something beneath the surface.
So the text that you brought up, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, I think that came out in 1979 - incredibly important book. Because a lot of second wave feminism, 60s and 70s, had said Jane Austen is not a primary author for us or not an author that can be as important to the second wave, because these novels end in marriage. And it was a moment in the feminist movement, when looking for something that expressed anger, that expressed alternative lifestyles, was seen as more important than reinforcing heteronormativity, which is what Austen was imagined as doing. So what I think what Gilbert and Gubar did is allowed for feminists and feminist critics and scholars and people beyond that circle, to look at Austen and say, “What if we didn't emphasize the ending? What if we emphasize the other parts of the story?” And of course, they took that to a lot of other different texts and the “madwoman” in the attic is actually a reference, as you know, to Jane Eyre, to Bertha Mason? What if you read Jane Eyre and centered Bertha Mason, which is of course exactly what Jean Rhys did in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea. But Gilbert and Gubar gave us a framework to say, “Let's look at the parts of these novels from a feminist perspective that maybe we haven't focused on.” And I think it opened up so much possibility for Austen, reading it through that lens of saying,”Maybe there's more here than the ending. Maybe there's more here than heteronormativity. There is a lot more going on.” And I'm really grateful to that book for doing that. I do think there is some tendency now to turn it all into, “Well, it doesn't mean this, it means this exactly the opposite.” To me, that's doing exactly what we shouldn't be doing. We're just closing down the text. … “Here's a clue. Now we'll find an answer. Now we've got this new clue, solve next mystery.” These are not mysteries with solutions. They are moral quagmires - and you can't solve a moral quagmire with a fact or an answer.
Plain Jane: I love that. I love the way you say, “Don't shut down the text.” I love the way you describe that 1979 Madwoman in the Attic, because you're right. They were just, I guess at a time when you know, feminism was wearing Doc Martens and reading Hemingway …
Devoney Looser: … and reading Kate Millett and Sexual Politics: Let's find the sexism. It was a sexism-identification moment, which is really important because a lot of people couldn't see it until people like Millett and others said, “Oh my gosh, there's sexism here in every single book, how do we not notice this?”
Plain Jane: Yeah. And they were saying, These are women's lives, let's interrogate what's happening with stories by women, about women, really going in depth in their lives. And they happen to be genius, as well. You know, Devoney, you also say, in your book, The Making of Jane Austen, that Jane Austen has, in many ways, been the making of you. This is getting back to you a little bit, Devoney. In what ways is Jane Austen and the making of you? I know a few of those ways. But why did you write that?
Devoney Looser: Well, I think, again, this is the reason this story resonates with people is because all of us who care about literature, and who allow books to lead us places, probably had moments like this. Mine is slightly more bizarre than most people's in that I now make a living from reading Jane Austen. And as you said, I read lots of other things, too. I read Jane Austen in the context of the history of women's writing, which has been very opening up of territory for me as a scholar, and I help lead people to read outside of her. But I've also been able to create a romantic life that started around conversations with her - and I know you know, this - that I met my husband, George Justice is also an Austen scholar. We met over a conversation and an argument on Jane Austen's books.
Plain Jane: What were you arguing about again? What book? Was it Mansfield Park?
Devoney Looser: It was Mansfield Park. So my husband George and I were introduced at a cocktail party that I was crashing. … And George had actually been invited. And we had a brief conversation that ended, but he came and found me because somebody said to him that I had worked on Jane Austen. And so he said, “I hear you work on Jane Austen. What's your favorite Jane Austen novel?” And I know, you know, George, Janet. So you know that he likes to ask these kind of puncturing questions, right. … … And I said, “Well, the one that I'm working on right now is Northanger Abbey.” And he said, “I didn't ask you which one you're working on. I asked you which one's your favorite.” He heard that I was working on it. But he wanted me to make an aesthetic, you know, you want to make a judgement about which one's the best. … So I said, Well, I guess my favorite is Pride and Prejudice. And George said very proudly, “Well, my favorite is Mansfield Park. … And so I said, “Well, Mansfield Park is my least favorite. And I like it the least because I don't like the heroine. Fanny Price is too much like me. She's boring.
Plain Jane: You said that?!
Devoney Looser: Yes. And George said at that moment that he said to himself in his head, “I'm gonna marry this woman.” So you really need to hear his side of it. I just thought, this guy's kind of needling me. And I'm shutting down his meddling with, you know, disarming honesty and sarcasm.
But you know, I do mean it, I did at the time. I really felt like a very shy person and quiet person and I had more class sympathies with Fanny Price of all of Jane Austen's heroines. But I didn't like those parts myself. I didn't like being quiet and timid, and didn't appreciate her as a character, I think, in a way that I now do. But he did end up proposing to me that night. And I said, “No.” I said, “I don't believe in the institution of marriage.” But whatever. What I can say is that he was very persuasive. And within about a month we decided we'd have a Jane-Fairfax-and-Frank-Churchill-style secret engagement. And we got married. We got married about a year later. So George is very persuasive.
Plain Jane: That's awesome. I did not know that he had proposed and that you had declined on that same evening. And I love it that you relate to Fanny Price and find that kind of complicated. Now I have to say, you have told me that story, Devoney. And I had forgotten the details about Fanny Price. But I learned them again, from the First impressions podcast, where they were talking about you on that podcast, and that you related to Fanny Price. And that got me thinking about who people relate to in Jane Austen novels. And I feel like Jane Austen is putting herself - I feel like all authors, for much of the time - are putting themselves in not just the positive aspects of characters … She's even probably in Mrs. Norris a little bit, you know? Think of your worst person, you know? There's a part of her that wants to be Lady Bertram, probably. And there's certainly a part of her that's Fanny Price. And there's certainly a part of her that's Emma, who's also a difficult character. So anyway … does George love Fanny Price?
Devoney Looser: I think George loves underdogs who triumph. And I think to him, he likes the idea of people who weren't born to it sticking up for themselves. And he likes the idea of there being greater opportunity for people who weren't necessarily born to opportunity. And I think that's the story of his grandparents and his parents. So I think that's where he came to the love of that particular plot, out of stories from his own family.
Plain Jane: So we are talking about, we've been talking about, the way people take on Jane Austen for their causes. You also talk about the fact that Jane Austen has ... carried pop culture and high culture simultaneously. Almost maybe like almost no other artist, maybe Shakespeare can carry those two at the same time. And you also walk both of those worlds. Can you talk a little bit about that? How are we doing with those two things right now? I mean, Jane Austen's probably bigger than ever before, right, today? And are we kind of bringing the high culture of the scholarly and the fandom together in interesting ways? And in productive ways?
Devoney Looser: Yeah, that's such a great question. And the “greater than ever before,” quite possibly, if only because of how communication is greater than ever before, right? … But there were moments where she definitely popped in popular culture before now, you know, millions of people saw that Broadway play in 1935 that moved to the West End in London, the next year. This was another moment of Austen pop culture saturation. Where I think if we were able to compare it, then, to now we might say she was in the imagination of the cultural imagination to a pretty great degree in these other moments, too. But let's not go there - now I'm in the weeds! But I do think there is something about being in both worlds that really speaks to my sense of our responsibility as scholars to be educators, but also to be trying to understand the world outside of the academy and seeing that as a talking across, not a talking down. And there are moments where it's easier for scholars to remember that than others, but the talking across has really made new scholarly ideas possible. For me, this is a divided identity. I think you're capturing that accurately in how you describe it, Janet, but I want to make sure that I'm saying it's not a one way street for me. When we talk about teaching, those of us who are educators, we talk about learning from our students, and people often roll their eyes at that … But I think back to an old, classic and educational theory of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he talks about differently located learners. And the Janeite community through JASNA has definitely brought home to me the ways that differently located learners can inspire each other, and teach each other. And I think that is just really, really crucial. And I love that Jane Austen has made this possible.
Plain Jane: You know, we're in a way a lot of what we're talking about is her image. And how, you know, there's a lot under the surface of the Courtship and the Marriage Plot, that you've researched this, and written about it in The Making of Jane Austen. In what ways did her family contribute to this image? Can you talk a little bit about that? And why - why were they trying to create, if I have this right, a respectable sort of Aunt Jane? Do you feel like this is what she also would have perhaps wanted? I mean, class insult, class injury can be humiliating, and I feel like perhaps also Louisa May Alcott, some of these women writers who were writing for money, maybe did want to be seen first and foremost, as respectable. What do you think was going on with the family members painting her image?
Devoney Looser: I think this is a really difficult, multi-layered question. And I, of course, have different ways of answering this. But I think that the ways that her family described her, were trying to head off criticism. And I think if you look at the ways that women writers were treated in this period, you can understand why they wanted to head off the criticism. They very much wanted her not to be seen as strident Bluestocking, morally suspect. They very much wanted to put her on the side of … the polite, the proper, the lady .... Not the bitter spinster, not the ugly woman who couldn't get married or who was having all sorts of morally questionable behaviors with men. But the woman who was very much doing the “femininity”, quote-unquote, 1810s and the 1820s. So at first, I think that's what her family is up to. And the extent to which she would have been excited about that, I don't know. But it does seem quite possible that she would have endorsed staying to the side of that. Because in the same way that 70s feminists brought us to see the ways that language was about Virgins and W****s - not that no one had ever noticed this. But I think in Second Wave feminism, the Women's Studies classes, let us look at the words that were used to describe women and their sexual experiences, and say, “Wow, this is really unbelievable,” right? So I think if we take that and we move that conversation back 150 years, I think the Austens were wise to the fact that you were not allowed to be anything other than one or the other. And it was very clear what you wanted to be if your choice was to be castigated as the woman writer so who is more virgin-like, or the woman writer who is more W***e-like, of course, she wanted to be on the side of the Virgin. It's a crime that this existed, right? It's a linguistic crime. But if you're a family trying to negotiate the reputation of your relative at the same time that some of you are clergymen and trying to make your way forward in polite society, titled society, elite society, of course ... She's a Public Woman. Those words aren't supposed to go together. You want to put her to the side of the one who wasn't looking for money, the one who wasn't looking for fame, the one who wasn't too learned. She was nice. She was doing this for her family. She wasn't doing this for fame or money, you see that? Already, you're talking about sides of a question, where putting your eggs in one basket results in a different outcome. So the extent to which Austen herself wanted that, what would be desirable of being on the other side of that? Very little, right?
Plain Jane: Listening to you talk makes me really understand that so much more. And also realize that in a way they were doing what Jane Austen seemed to do with her novels, which was to keep herself out of it. And maybe she's not as out of it on the third and fourth rereading as we thought she was on the first rereading. But she's kind of keeping herself out of it and just letting the story, letting the characters, say what she really doesn't want to be seen saying particularly, perhaps.
Devoney Looser: You know that I'm working on two contemporaries of Jane Austen, Jane and Anna Maria Porter. I'm writing this book, Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter in the Age of Austen. And where for Austen, we have 161 letters of hers [that] have survived. So when we try to say, “What did Jane Austen think?” The novels give us a certain amount to go on. But a lot of us say, well, “What did she say in her letters where we can assume that she was being more of a quote-unquote, authentic self?” … But the idea that we only have 161 of these to go on; for the Porter sisters, they were both novelists. And they wrote thousands of letters, which they painstakingly preserved. And so to be able to go through these thousands of letters between these two sisters who are looking at literary culture through the eyes of public women and literary women, and looking at the ways that they describe the things that they want people to believe and what they're actually doing behind the scenes, has been really illuminating for me. And I hope other people will be interested in reading about that too, people who are interested in Austen, people who are interested in the early 19th century and Regency culture, Victorian culture, because the Porter sisters lived longer than Jane Austen did. [And] the ways that they tried to navigate making decisions with agency and with, specifically, female agency and romantic agency and a culture that said that, as Austen puts it, their only power should be the power of refusal. And they, the Porter sisters, were doing things all the time that you weren't supposed to do. And we know it because they were writing about it with each other. They were innovators in historical fiction. And Jane Porter claimed, I think with with some accuracy, that she was the one who influenced and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, which was published in 1814.
Plain Jane: Wow, you had us at Hello - our sisters writing to each other, during the Regency and beyond, and they have each other, they're doing historic fiction. I mean, I just think hashtag-Regency is going to blow up over these two sisters! I think that sounds like a lot of fun. I just feel like there is a hunger to broaden out these conversations, and you can see it, the conversations are being broadened out in such exciting ways, especially right now. Books, like The Woman of Colour, and then every conversation we can have about Bridgerton - like anything to do with the Regency and people's lives and especially the lives that we’re uncovering that have been overlooked: Women writers, Black citizens of the Regency in Britain, and it's just and so many others. It's just really exciting. So I feel like there's a hunger for these conversations.
Devoney Looser: And I think it's absolutely crucial and important that we start to try to understand race relations in the early 19th century. And think about why we care about them so much. Now, that's what literature should do. I get really frustrated when people want to tell us that we're taking questions from the present and popping them back falsely under the past. This is not at all we're doing. Things are popping in our moment that we can see, we’re also popping in Austen's moment. ,,, Maybe she doesn't write about them to the degree that some of us would now wish she had. But these questions are there. And we are having a real opportunity, through scholars like Gretchen Gerzina and Patricia Matthew, and others who are helping us look back to the abolition movement, look back to texts, like The Woman of Colour, which Lyndon Dominique edited in a fabulous edition for Broadview Press that everybody should run out and buy. This is a novel from 1809, an anonymous novel. All of these works are giving us new opportunities to read Austen in terms of race issues that were important in her own day and to her novels. And for very good reasons have popped up in ours, so I'm excited about the opportunity to open up these questions.
I do think there is something about being in both worlds that really speaks to my sense of our responsibility as scholars to be educators, but also to be trying to understand the world outside of the academy and seeing that as a talking-across, not a talking-down. And there are moments where it's easier for scholars to remember that than others. But the talking across has really made new scholarly ideas possible.
Plain Jane: And some of this is historians also - Gretchen Gerzina, in a previous episode, alerted me to the National Trust report that was done documenting the ties to the slave trade in the Great Houses in England. Such a simple thing, really. And very much a historic enterprise, not a political enterprise in any sense, other than [that] everything is political. But that's exciting. And then you've also contributed to this conversation about the legacy of slavery and the ties to the slave trade in the Austen family. Do you want to talk about that at all? I mean, this is something that's just been published in The Times Literary Supplement and then picked up a lot of places. Do you want to just give a takeaway on what was going on with your research on that and what you'd like people to keep in mind when they think about Austen's family and the slave trade?
Devoney Looser: Absolutely. So the May 21 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, which is a weekly newspaper that anyone who cares about literature should subscribe to … I am very honored to have published it. I did a piece on Austen and abolition, looking deeply and very minutely into the Austen family's relationship to slavery and abolition. And people are asking a question now, “Was Austen pro-slavery or anti-slavery? Was the author’s family pro-slavery or anti-slavery?” And because of things like the National Trust report that you just mentioned, and a freely available database called the Legacies of Slavery that's run out of UCL by a scholar named Catherine Hall and a team. This is a freely available database, George Austen's name shows up in that database, because he was a trustee for a sugar plantation in Antigua that was owned by somebody who was probably a student at Oxford. So this is the fact that we had, and that has been repeated, that Austen's implicated in the economics of slavery. And what my piece did, is tried to look at what that means, and to try to deepen that conversation. And what I, the takeaway, for me is that the Austen family can be described as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery. And this is probably true for a lot of 19th century families, frankly, where you would have members who were on different sides, quote-unquote, of these questions. But the moment we try to turn it into sides, we're missing an opportunity for further description and nuance. And what my piece shows is that George Austen probably never benefited financially from this trusteeship. He was a co-trustee. And I go into a lot of description about that. And that years afterward, 80 years after that, Henry Thomas Austen, we never noticed this before: Henry Thomas Austen was a delegate to an anti-slavery convention. So we have a member of the immediate Austen family, a political activist, against the institution of slavery and with the anti-slavery movement. So to me, this tells us that the Austen family was both of these things. And I think it's an additional piece of information for us to understand the ways that race and slavery come into Austen's novels and the ways that she is working with the difficulties and complexities of this issue that was central to the moment she lived in.
Plain Jane: What do you love most about introducing people to Austen? And what surprises you when you teach - in the classroom, or in Great Courses, from people that you hear from all the many Janeite and fandom conversations that you so graciously, drop in on Zoom with? What do you love about introducing people to Jane Austen?
Devoney Looser: Yeah, so these 24 30-minute lectures I did for the Great Courses, which is interestingly just rebranded itself as Wondrium. But I say there, and I say this at the beginning of my classes as well: I love these books. And I love the ways that these books have inspired me to be a better thinker and have created certain things in my life that have become possible and meaningful to me. But it is absolutely not required to me that anyone in my class come out loving them like I do. What I want is for students to find that thing that is meaningful to them. And that generates meaning for them - that's generative, to go back to that word again. And I think when students take me at my word, I'm very grateful. I want them to read closely and think about these things. But it is absolutely not required that they see in them what I see.
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Thank you for reading, listening and being here, my friends. Please stay safe and enjoy your remaining days of summer. We’ll be back next week - and it’s all about my conversation with definitive Austen biographer Claire Tomalin! I caught her at home, safe, enjoying her garden during the pandemic, and I’ll share our conversation here, same time, same place, next week!
Below are many of the authors that Devoney mentioned in this conversation, with links to finding out more.
If you enjoyed this conversation, please do share it!
And if you’d like to have more conversations like these dropped in your inbox, subscribe - it’s free!
More Reading and Cool Links:
* Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: https://www.npr.org/2013/01/17/169548789/how-a-madwoman-upended-a-literary-boys-club
* Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: https://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/paulo-freire-biography/
* Gretchen Gerzina - https://gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html
* Lyndon Dominque, editor: The Woman of Colour: https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-woman-of-colour/#tab-description
* Patricia Matthew: https://www.montclair.edu/newscenter/experts/dr-patricia-matthew/
* UCL slavery database: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
* Devoney Looser’s website: http://www.devoneylooser.com/
* The Wondrium/Great Courses on Jane Austen: www.thegreatcourses.com/janeausten
Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe -
Professor Danielle Christmas is a scholar in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her day-job, she researches serious topics about race and history, from white nationalism to the legacy of slavery and the Holocaust, and how issues like this are depicted in our cultural currency.
But when she’s off the clock and needs to unplug, Danielle Christmas turns to Jane Austen. And she says even though she doesn't always want to, she can't help bringing her knowledge of race and history into these stories.
As co-editor of the most recent issue of the JASNA journal Persuasions Online, Danielle Christmas has become a convener of conversations within the Janeite and academic community on race and the works of Jane Austen. She took some time recently to chat with us about that issue, and everything from Fanny Price and the history behind Mansfield Park, to binging “Bridgerton.” And she says, for her, escaping to a Regency world can be both guilt-free and fruitful. Here's our conversation.
Danielle Christmas
Sometimes I really like the idea of putting my brain to the use of just having fun - of playing around in a text that's beautifully written and is doing subtle work, right? [During the day] I'm talking about slavery and the Holocaust. And my new work is on white nationalism. That's loud, there’s nothing [subtle] about that. And you have to pay attention to the corners and the contours of what's happening in [Jane Austen’s] novels, in order to really understand the stakes. And it's just a good brain exercise [and] it trains me to pay attention to the small things. Whereas maybe if I'm spending all of my time, just looking at the loud - you know, the loudness, the violence, all of that - I miss the corners.
Plain Jane
Well tell me, Danielle, because you are reading with all of that loudness around you. And you're very aware of this and you're … choosing to dedicate the time to exploring all those issues in our culture, everything from our lynching histories in our culture and the legacy of slavery and the legacy of racism. What do you bring as a reader with your expertise to Jane Austen, does that enter into it very much? Do you find comfort in the fact that she was surrounded by these conversations? And they are, like you say subtle, but they might be there like Edward Said says, - look at what's not there as well as what is there.
Danielle Christmas
Yes, exactly! That it's always there. Even if it's not there. It's there and it's absence and the fact that it's absent, is itself indicating something that we should be thinking about that's doing something whether or not it's present in the room.
I think it's fascinating that people that we talk to so much in this special issue that we're doing [in] Persuasions, there is a lot going on, of course about the triangle trade and how that works. And yet there are four lines in Mansfield Park … or the sum total of what Jane Austen clearly said, explicitly said - explicitly-ish! - that is her making a direct reference to slavery.
If we, we smart people, we smarty-pants people, have so much to say, based on four lines and its absence, then there really is something fascinating going on. Anytime there is a narrative, a television series, a book, anything that has to do, it is deeply embedded in a construction of class culture, right? And manners. There are all sorts of politics that surround that. And she was right. …
She was a brilliant woman and a brilliant writer who wrote knowing that, right? It's intentional. I think that sometimes it's fascinating to encounter resistance among people who love Jane Austen, out of fear, I think, that we're pushing politics into a space where it's like a protected space. So why are we bringing politics into yet another thing, right? Like, why are we? It's there! … If we were living in Regency times, there's no way to read her work without understanding it as construction of political narrative.
Not only that, or maybe not primarily that, but to write a romance novel at the time is itself a political exercise. And so acknowledging the truth of that - two things can be true at the same time. This is what I like, my major discovery in my 30s: Things can be true, a person can be, you know, racist and fascinating; a person could be writing just enjoyable romantic fiction, and also be doing something interesting and political. And I think that's what's happening. And it's easy to to get our hackles up on either side of that, to insist that it is only politics. And to forget that it's more fascinating.
So why are we bringing politics into yet another thing, right? Like, why are we? It's there! … If we were living in Regency times, there's no way to read her work without understanding it as construction of political narrative.
I think maybe this is my pop culture brain. But it's more fascinating because it's not just politics, right? Like she's doing something that is supposed to be an exercise in entertainment and pleasure. But she's playing this all out. And in a tableau that's tends to be people of a certain like wealth and class and that money comes from someplace, their comfort comes from someplace, the exclusion or not, of people.
You cannot read Mansfield Park outside of those four lines, without understanding Fanny, and her absence of wealth, her relationship to the wealthier family, and the way that that interaction works as anything except a political inquiry into how relationships with family and money work and power, and morals and ethics, right?
Plain Jane
So everything you say, Danielle, so interesting about Mansfield Park: They have to get their money at Mansfield Park from somewhere. You mentioned the four lines about “dead silence.” There's so much in that novel, if you're closely reading the text, that are choices that Jane Austen is making. And … she's so good at her job that we forget that there's a puppeteer. There's a conductor, who's making choices about how Mansfield Park gets its money, about where Sir Thomas goes when he leaves Mansfield Park, about what Fanny Price is reading. So much more than the “dead silence,” you know?
So tell me more. Danielle, when I read it, it occurred to me that it's not it doesn't seem to me like too much of a stretch to see Mansfield Park and its dismantling, I would say it's kind of reduced to rubble. By the end of it. It's kind of destroyed! And the only person who's still standing is Fanny Price. And I feel like it could be a metaphor for a sort of dismantling of England through colonialism - morally - not paying attention to your house, being out there and not concentrating on what's real and what's actually ethical. And the consequences of that. Do you think that's too much of a stretch?
Danielle Christmas
That’s provocative! I kind of love that! I would have to sit and think about that.
I think if that's plausible, and as a sort of larger metaphor, I think that maybe … you'll get my preemptive defenses against those people who tend to in general, tell me I'm bringing politics into politics-free spaces. So [they’ll say], “It's just romance. Right? It's happy. It's just pop culture. Why are you insisting?”
I think because of that, I tend to be more conservative in the claims that I make than you're being.
I think that my the most conservative account that I could easily defend - that I think that any person could reasonably defend: After you learn a little bit about Jane Austen's family in general (I resist psychoanalytic readings of an author through their work, don't think it's helpful), but you can't find out that her father has a trustee relationship with a plantation, or find out that her brother would patrol waters for slave ships, and not think about how knowing that in her relationship to them, and doing that would inform her decision to write this novel. And what to include, and not.
So I think the most conservative thing to say about slavery, history, [and] politics, and the novel, is that just the insistence that she's publishing this, and that she's insisting that people who like her novels, and enjoy her kind of writing, read this.
That is disruption. That is interesting. Just that, yes. So, just even stopping there, makes me curious.
I think sometimes I feel like my job as a teacher, maybe less so in my writing, but as a teacher, is just to make us notice things that we noticed, but didn't realize were important to notice. Like to just say if I was teaching a class, like, what do you guys think that a woman who was writing what we could call - even at the time -chicklit, right? Like a woman who's writing - yes, a smart woman - who's writing for other literate smart women, inasmuch as any woman is considered especially smart and literate at the time, who's interested in reading a romantic novel happened to do this. Like happens to mediate this particular story through the experience of a deep privilege? And, what you're saying, which is really the kind of collapse of privilege in one family, right? So, like, and this is where we're going. Just think about that, guys.
I'm a new historicist. So I want to know what's going on all around the page. I want to know what helped make the story and I want to know what the story is doing off of the page.
And so there is an entire ecosystem around what we can talk about - this really weird thing she did, right? Like, it's just a weird thing! There's a way to have told that story, so that all I needed to do was curl up on my couch and read it and not really have to do any heavy lifting. Not grapple with what it means that there are four lines of silence.
I think sometimes I feel like my job as a teacher, maybe less so in my writing, but as a teacher, is just to make us notice things that we noticed, but didn't realize were important to notice.
You know, Fanny really is the subject of abuse. … And I think because so many of us read the novel, and so many of us who are doing it outside of the context of the classroom, are doing it for pleasure reading. And ... if I'm reading this novel for pleasure, I don't want to sit with Fanny's pain very long. It is unpleasant. It's really cruel the way she's treated. But if we pause and think about that, that is quite a choice that Jane Austen made: to insist that somebody who wants to pick up the genre that they would expect her to be writing, that they have to walk through that maltreatment.
And it's not just, you know, a heroine who's mistreated. She is the subject of abuse. Compared to how people feel about Lizzy Bennet, you know, everyone wants to be Lizzy Bennet, right?
Fanny is meek. She is not … as charming. And, you know, she’s just coming from a different place. What a heroine she is, right? What a curious heroine she is compared to who we've come to know from Jane Austen's other novels. What do we do with that? What do we make of that? Sometimes I think the most fruitful things come from just realizing that there are questions that we haven't been asking.
Plain Jane
Let me get to some of your work. Danielle. You are the Co-editor of the most recent issue of Persuasions … and it's a peer-reviewed publication of JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America. And it features essays on Jane Austen and her world. Can you tell me a little bit about the most current issue, which is called “Beyond the Bit of Ivory, Jane Austen and Diversity”? By the way, I put the Call for Papers, link in our chat. It's so beautiful, the first paragraph of that.
Danielle Christmas
I'm so glad that you think it's beautifully written. You know, it was fascinating. We encountered each other through the “Race and the Regency” series. That was a fascinating multi-month journey ... hearing different lectures. But .. because so many of us are asking questions about race, we're asking questions we didn't know we should have been asking .... So that's good and important work then, right?
If you sit back and think, OK, we're all kind of engaged in that thinking JASNA has jumped in. Like at Chawton [House], where they were doing the Black Lives Matter to Jane Austen exhibit and all of that. I mean, like, Whoa. Fascinating. Like, who is mad who's yelling? Why? What are the stakes to people? What's happening? … Like, what is that alarmism about? People who have different intellectual stakes in the way that we remember, and read Jane Austen.
We're all bringing a different set of thoughts and values and questions to this figure, as an abstract person, as a writer, as a creator of stories. We are mapping on to these stories, all sorts of powers that they may or may not have.
So this special issue is an opportunity for us, in this moment, to do some deep thinking about those questions.
Fanny is meek. … What a curious heroine she is compared to who we've come to know from Jane Austen's other novels. What do we do with that? What do we make of that? Sometimes I think the most fruitful things come from just realizing that there are questions that we haven't been asking.
You know, there are plenty of folks who have been working on the intersection of these questions in these histories and Jane Austen's work for a long time. So it's not as if, you know, finally scholars are coming to ask questions. But for maybe different scholars than before, and some who have been … in this wheelhouse, but different folks who maybe haven't been a part of the conversation yet.
And all of us, right, whether or not we've been a part of the conversation, or we're new to it, or having this conversation right now. And now is a different time to be having this conversation. Asking questions about Race in the Regency four years ago is interesting and important. But it's different right now. There is something different happening in the … stakes of the way that we think and argue and remember racial history.
Plain Jane
The very first sentence in the Call for Papers [says] “the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and the pandemic that has disproportionately killed along racial lines have shocked the world into a confrontation of inequities resulting from individual behavior, institutional design, and even attachment to limited and comfortable perspectives.”
That's really powerful language to introduce a Call for Papers about Jane Austen and the world of Jane Austen. What did you mean in that first sentence - “limited and comfortable perspectives that we might be attached to”?
Danielle Christmas
Well, what it makes me think now about is the fact that I think a lot of us, if you read that Call for Papers and agree, like, Wow, that's an important conversation to be having. Then it's likely that at least a little bit, when we read Jane Austen or - heaven forbid - we like go binge a Netflix series, right? So … Why should we be wasting hours doing this, it’s purely an exercise in like, you know, self pleasure, whatever?
Plain Jane
Well, let's just say what we're all thinking right now, which is: “Bridgerton.” So yes, as we're watching “Bridgerton” …?
Danielle Christmas
Right?! As we all sit for one day and watch the entirety of the series!
We, I don't know, I won't project for lots of others, but I've talked to enough people who are the same people who would read that Call for Papers and think, “This is urgent and important.” And then would would realize that there is some degree of guilt that we feel when we are cozied up right now reading Jane Austen.
Like … what does it mean? That we're exercising our comfortable privilege to sit and relax and read a feel-good book, you know? I feel guilt about that. I feel guilt as a person, as a scholar who has a certain set of values. But as a Black woman who understands all of the history that's in the background of Jane Austen, I sit with some guilt about what is and is not there.
I think that it's really helpful to see that, and talk about that, and not suggest that, like, that guilt can't do fruitful things.
In this Persuasions issue, there are some folks who are not, quote, “scholars,” right? These are not the usual suspects that you would find in a typical peer-reviewed journal. Lots of people submitted, and some of the folks that we're publishing are non-university folks. And … we are all bringing a set of active considerations that typically are dismissed as inappropriate for informing questions and answers, and we're insisting that that's OK. And it's interesting, and it can do interesting stuff.
Some of the essays, unlike a sort of traditional peer-reviewed journal, are coming more from a place of practice. Some of them are coming more from a place of intellectual memoir.
And ... that is so valuable, especially when we're thinking about what it means to talk about this figure in this time, considering that the passing description of her is a woman in the 1800s, who wrote romance novels, right? Like that's the quick and short version. There's a lot of problems we need to fix right now. And that's really an indulgence and there's something to be worked out. It feels like an exercise in privilege. And that’s really [the source of] some of the resistance and alarmism, I think, is that we don't like what it might mean about us if we don't want to think about that.
Who wants to think about that, right?! Like who wants to think, “Oh, yeah, there's the Zong crisis, is happening in the background, right? Maybe Lord Mansfield, the real man had something to do with the Mansfield Park.” Like what a terrible … who wants to think about that?!
… But if you just read it - to take away that you feel guilty, there's something wrong with you if you don't enthusiastically embrace the idea of talking about race, slavery and Jane Austen, right? Like you are intellectually dishonest, whatever. I think it's more interesting that, like, none of us really want to do that thinking!
That she made it a little difficult to do that thinking. She could have been more explicit. But … an adult mind that's really fully formed and inclined to do critical thinking cannot read her novels and not ask questions about power, money, history, race. Like all of that stuff, the silences and the explicit statements: We have to notice it. We do or don't have to choose to ignore it. … It's not wrong, that on Tuesday, after doing my research on white nationalism, I don't really want to think about that.
… I have a lot of students who are inclined to think that talking about this stuff means that a professor's telling them they should feel guilty about stuff. … They're conditioned to think that, like I'm saying you should have been thinking about this all along and shame on you.
What I would say to them is, I think the most important thing about consuming any culture - so Jane Austen or any media - is to be deliberate and intentional … If you sit down and decide to binge “Bridgerton” … I'm gonna have fun. It's Netflix. Like, it's been a tough day. But do that knowing that today, you're … choosing not to think about all of the racial politics that Shonda Rhimes introduced by creating this alternate race history in England. The fact that she … [introduced] the visual politics of having characters of having a Black man and a white woman fall in love - in the context, just having interracial romance is itself a really political, challenging thing to represent. And to think about, especially now that I live in the south, to look at, to argue about, to remember to [think about] all of that. And Shonda Rhimes is like, “No, no, no. I'm not going to let you enjoy that without noticing what you're not noticing.”
So I think it's just fine to decide, I don't really want to do that right now., I don't want to do that thinking.
But tomorrow: Do that thinking, or know that it's thinking that needs to happen. And that you aren't appreciating the text for the fullness of what it is. ... You'll actually, I think, enjoy it more.
Maybe you consider, like, what a decision she made, right? Like what a fascinating decision she made that we're arguing now, again, about Queen Charlotte and whether she was Black. And our construction of race - it's fascinating to hear what people have to say about Queen Charlotte being Black, as if race operated in the same way then as it does now. All of that.
Plain Jane
And in all of what you just said, something sticks out to me that I want to pick up - which is Jane Austen could have been more explicit. And I want to be careful that when I'm saying, “Fanny Price burns the b***h down!” You know, [that[ I'm not superimposing what I would have loved for Jane Austen to be thinking and saying. I do think, though, the more you hear the more you think, ‘“Yeah, there's that subtext. Maybe even not as subtle as I thought.”
And you mentioned something in “Race and the Regency” and your talk on the Zong slave ship - [that] calling Mansfield Park Mansfield Park is a little bit like writing a novel today and calling it Scalia House. There's no way that's not saying something.
So anyway, I think it's, it's not politics. It's life. If you think that we need to just sit and escape this, and your students want to just escape, and not look at this. It's not politics they're escaping from, it's basically life. It's just the real world that they're escaping from. But yet you need to escape from it. So do I and we all do that.
So it's about life. And it is painful. That's the other thing you said, Yes, it's painful. You know, wherever you're coming from when you're reading Jane Austen. And when you're having these conversations about privilege, it's painful.
But yet I feel like the art is what helps us work through it.
So I guess that's what I pull away: the art.
… But all of that noise, as you say. that loudness … was seeping in. So it's there. And it's just going to be unpacked and unraveled for generations to come.
Danielle Christmas
Absolutely. You know, and as I'm listening to us, and listening to you and thinking about what both of us are talking about, I think [of] another discomfort: This is really a sacred cow. So I'm spending time with Janeites. And talking about all this interesting stuff and enjoying books. And I think something that we don't like, this group that I've been spending time with ..., is that Jane Austen probably had some racial attitudes that we really wouldn't like. Right?
So, really problematic racial attitudes and racial values.
And that's hard, right? Like, if we, if we love her work, if we feel like she was doing important, disruptive, interesting stuff, that then challenges us. I think that brings forward ... the stuff that's, like, what does it mean about me?
If I like a person, you know, I don't want to admit that about her because it means something about me. … What are my values if I enjoy that?
And it is itself a kind of, like: Two things can be true, right? It can be true that she's doing interesting, disruptive, fascinating stuff. And she, I would put money down on her having racial attitudes that were not too awesome, right?
I think the helpful thing to remember is we don't know, we'll never know, It's not really that interesting to argue about that.
But that actually, I think, is the core of some of that alarmism, the unstated core of it. Which is like, “Are you trying to indict Jane Austen?”
No, who can do that? What are we doing? It's so fascinating because I would say to a person who said that to me, like, I'm not gonna indict her, I don't have to! It is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which she would formulate her thoughts of how the world works, and how people work, and that she would think that I, a Black woman, am of equal intelligence.… She might - that'd be delightful! There's no way for me to know that! ...
But, you know, I actually think it's not that interesting to acknowledge that she was a person. That's, just a person of her time. And so I want to - even among the people who it's fun to have these conversations with - disrupt the sacred, you know, really kill the sacred cow. … We must admit that this person whose work we love … we're being intellectually dishonest if we refuse that.
And I actually think that's something that's really hard for us to do.
There are still people who would read that Call for Papers who would share my values or do interesting work, but who will still be unsettled if I say to them, that according to today's values, and the way that we construct the idea of racism, Jane Austen was probably racist. That really makes people uncomfortable.
Now, you know, it was my intellectual upbringing, like, how I was trained as a scholar, I was raised to be a little polemical. In some ways, I just kind of want to see what happens if I throw that out. ...
If I go into a room and say, “What are you going to do with that? Here's the way that works” But outside of being kind of mischievous, I actually think that's probably true. And that's OK. Like, I don't think it means I shouldn't enjoy her work. I don't think it means anything about anyone who does enjoy her work. I think it means something about all of us. If we are so deeply resistant to a likelihood … I think that requires some interrogation. And that's work that even people who read that call for proposals, lots of those people who are open to different ways of thinking, so they are not themselves villainous. But like, they're not noticing what they're not noticing. Which is maybe their own resistance to the idea that, according to the way that we reasonably assign the label racism, [Jane Austen] is probably racist. What do we do with that?
Plain Jane
Well, you're challenging me, Danielle. Because I did have a question on here: In what ways is reading Jane Austen and Jane Austen, you know, of her time, possibly problematic for us? But it was painful to even write that question. And I asked myself, Is that really necessary?
And you're telling me, it is necessary. Again, it's another thing that's there or not there, to pull out and talk about, and just make sure, like you say, if, it's uncomfortable, why is it uncomfortable?
And it's okay, by the way to be uncomfortable! Something we all need to know.
But Danielle, basically, you can solve America, if we can all remember to keep two thoughts in our head. That's the first lesson. And then also just be OK with being uncomfortable. Just if we can all just do those two things. America, we’ll be on our way.
Danielle Christmas
Yeah! To insist that you have some thinking to do does not make you a villain: It means you have some thinking to do. We all have different thinking to do.
And then I might not have the same work to do. But I’ve got my own stuff.
It's funny. … This is like when I say this to my graduate students, this is very much me projecting my judgment of myself. In retrospect, I used to call everything “problematic.” My first job out of college was as an organizer. I was a union organizer driving around Missouri - so driving around where you are! - organizing people. Low-income people in downstate Missouri, doing all sorts of, you know, life [challenges.] If I had the mission, my mission was to change the world.
Plain Jane
That's a part of your bio I did not know! Danielle Christmas, ladies and gentlemen, driving around the byways, the blue highways of Missouri.
Danielle Christmas
It's an interesting state. It is an interesting state to be driving around as a 20-something Black woman there to organize low -income folks who are, you know, working their hardest. So that was a formative experience.
But because of that quite reasonably, I had an eye for like, everything that is “problematic.” And yes, … and I'm not picking on you for using that word. It’s a useful word.
Plain Jane
Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm around students, and daughters, you know who, yes, find everything problematic.
Danielle Christmas
It's just, it's lazy. That's the thing to remember about myself, and what I noticed about my students. And the reason that I push them. It's not because they're calling something out that needs to be examined more closely. It's that it's lazy to call it “problematic” and stop right there. It's like, it is an empty explanation that explains nothing.
Plain Jane
So you're right. It's kind of jargon and you do a great job of cutting through the jargon. Especially for an academic, right?.
Danielle Christmas
See, that's my dream!
Plain Jane
One thing I have to ask along these lines is that you are spending a lot of time, you say, among Janeites. And you mentioned not everyone would love that Call for Proposals.
I mean, what do you think, because these conversations are going on in a really dynamic, fantastic way with race and the Regency in the Jane Austen world. But there also people that would like to see - and they're coming out on Twitter and saying, openly and thoughtfully I think, that they would like to see things going faster. They'd like to see change. They'd like to see a more assertive discussion about diversity and equity.
But what is your sense of the JASNA community and its take on equity and diversity and approaching all of these questions in the readings of Jane Austen and her world?
Danielle Christmas
You know, that is a terrific question. And it's a complicated question. I think that what's good about this special issue is that, this [is] one corner of what needs to happen, which is intellectual work, that we expressed commitment to prioritizing that thinking. So that intellectual work and making that accessible. That is one corner. And that's one corner that I'm excited to participate in.
The voices that are saying that that is not enough, are absolutely right. It would be dishonest of JASNA, were anyone just saying, and I don't think they would say, “You know, that's it, we're checking it off.” … So I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of, JASNA’s ambition around this, right? …
A part of that is the intellectual work, of making that accessible as a publication.
But the other stuff the, like, let's revisit infrastructure. Let's ... look at our mission statement. And let's look at participation, the inclusion of other voices in the way the organization is run. All that absolutely needs to happen.
And that work always takes longer, right? It's always messier. It's always more complicated.
And I understand people saying, like, you know, “tick tock..” What I'm excited about is that this moment is giving us an opportunity to prioritize the discussions.
I would actually say of myself that I am, I'm probably unfairly patient. I am predisposed, maybe because of like, the, ugliness that I work with. And my need to like my particular intellectual project or public-facing scholarship is to figure out how to do that, how to make these conversations. possible, not hostile, really interesting, and move at the pace that people can have those conversations, right?
So, do I think we should all burn down the system to stop white nationalism? Sure. Is that going to happen? No. So that means that I've got to talk to a lot of people who really disagree with me ... So I have a sense of pace and scale … So I would not call myself the best measure of pace of change, right?
Also, I think, because I have the good fortune of doing what I think is this really important part of the work. And that primarily being, I've joined the editorial board of Persuasions and I'm really excited about making sure that this isn't a single special-issue thing. That this conversation continues and expands, that we're not ghettoizing this work.
So I know, that's a commitment they have. And I know those other conversations are happening. And I know there's frustration.
There's a reason for optimism, because we’re having a conversation. And the most important thing - and this does come from my days as a union organizer - is to cultivate allies where we can find them.
So I know that there are people who are part of JASNA leadership, who are all about making this happen, even if we're different people in different corners …
So make the make noise - because no change happens without noise.
Plain Jane
Do you want to say any more about “Bridgerton?” I mean, I know that you saw it as an escape. Does it in any way advance the conversations, on all of these conversations on race and the Regency?
Danielle Christmas
I actually think it does really important work. Because there are arguments now about casting of Anne Boleyn in an upcoming film production that has her as a Black woman - a dark-skinned Black woman playing opposite a very … expected casting for Henry. There are dozens of future Jane Austen adaptations to come, because we love them, right? They're going to continue. They will be made as long as we watch them.
At what point are .. we going to insist that we see that in those kinds of adaptations?
I actually think that's really important.
If someone told me, this raises the question of whether we're gonna cast Black women as leads in Jane Austen films … I actually think that's really interesting.
I think so many of us like Jane Austen because we are Lizzy Bennet, right? We identify. We all want to be the people, we want to be leading ladyl. We're on the adventure, I would say even more so than lots of other works.
And Jane Austen's awesome, because she makes that easy. And her stories make that easy.
What does it mean for a new generation of viewer if we insist that you can look different?
I think part of my grappling ... in my own journey, is feeling frustration and guilt that I enjoy something that insists that I cannot look like the person who is the lead, right? What would it have meant if that wasn't a thing to grapple with? Because people telling Jane Austen stories today already did the work of saying, “No, her stories really transcend that. It doesn't have to look like … we expect it to look.”
That would have made a difference.
And I actually think that “Bridgerton” is insisting that he next time there's a production, if they decide to insist on a certain kind of casting, they're being deliberate and intentional about that.
And that's provocative, right? It means that if you are making the new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility [you remember]… that “Bridgerton” was super successful, right? If you're a person who wants something super successful, how much of success of “Bridgerton” could be attributed to - at least our interest at first - because of that strange world Shonda Rhimes [made] for us.
So it would be shrewd for the future adaptors of Jane Austen's work to calculate on whether there is any value in being equally provocative and making us curious. And actually, I do, I think that's more important than I would have expected. And I think - this is the mischief-maker in me - I think it's good to make a person be deliberate in saying, no, they're not going to do something. .. [If] you're making an adaptation, you should have to tell yourself now that you're only going to cast the usual suspects.
Plain Jane
Yes, it's changed the default in a way, maybe forever. And maybe it's been a long time coming. I mean, if you look back on so many adaptations, I think very soon, if we don't already, we'll be thinking, “Boy, that is a white world they created, and that doesn't even seem realistic.”
OK, so very much a random aside: When you're reading Jane Austen's descriptions of her characters now with a kind of an ear and an eye for colorism and depictions and descriptions, a lot of her lead characters - I think Eleanor Dashwood - [are] just described as Brown. So does that make it easier for you as a writer, a reader when you were younger? Did you like Soniah Kamal, who wrote Unmarriageable and who I've talked with. She said, from the very first time reading, Pride and Prejudice, it was Pakistani. Do you do make things what you need them to be in your head? I know I do as a reader as well.
Danielle Christmas
I think that's the only way that I can really enjoy Jane Austen. But I like that she makes that possible. ... I wouldn't go so far as to say that that is on a top 10 list of what makes her so accessible. … You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I really actually do think it's .. that she is so accessible because she makes it so easy for us to be the heroine. I do, you know, just as a reader, as a person who reads Jane Austen, for pleasure, it is easier to be transported by her work than lots of other things that I read that I would consider comparable.
Plain Jane
And we won't give her more credit than would have been deserved. But it I think one thing that's interesting as we talk about … the experience of reading is that it might have been unconscious. 5here are a lot of things that can be unconsciously happening. … But either way, it's interesting.
Do you have anything else to add that we haven't covered?
Danielle Christmas
I don't have anything else to add, It's such a pleasure. These were great questions. I hope that it is entertaining and fruitful for listeners. That too on my epitaph: “She was entertaining and taught us stuff”!
Plain Jane
You are entertaining, and you have taught us stuff, Danielle Christmas!
Thank you so much for joining us on the Austen Connection.
And thank YOU, Austen Connection readers, listeners, subscribers, engagers.
As always, if you liked this conversation, or think of anyone else who would find it interesting and, as Danielle Christmas says, “fruitful” - please share it!
You can also sign up for the Austen Connection, if you haven’t already, to get these conversations delivered right ot your Inbox.
Here are some awesome links to the things Danielle Christmas talked about in this conversation. Keep reading, and let us know your thoughts.
Cool Stuff/Links:
* The current issue of JASNA’s Persuasions Online: http://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-41-no-2/editors/
* Jane Austen & Co.’s discussion series “Race and the Regency” - it’s awesome: https://www.janeaustensummer.org/raceandtheregency
* More on Jane Austen & Co: https://www.janeaustenandco.org/
* NYT on Chawton House Museum and Black Lives Matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/world/europe/jane-austen-slavery-museum.html
* More on Danielle Christmas: https://englishcomplit.unc.edu/faculty-directory/danielle-christmas/
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Hello dear friends,
If you’ve watched the wildly-popular Netflix series Bridgerton or the wonderful film The Personal History of David Copperfield starring Dev Patel, you might have experienced and appreciated what today’s podcast guest saw: People of color in a fictionalized dramatization of 18th and 19th Century Britain. But in Gretchen Gerzina’s case - and unlike most of us - she knows the back stories of the real lives of Black residents of Britain in those eras.
Professor Gerzina says she is drawn to “biographies and lives of those who cross boundaries of history, time, place or race” - that’s on her website - and her work is all about this.
In books like Black London, Black Victorians, and Britain's Black Past, Gerzina bridges all of those boundaries for us - connecting us to people across time, place, and history - and introducing us to some of the Black performers, memoirists, activists and everyday people in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Professor Gerzina joined me a few weeks ago, by Zoom, for today’s Austen Connection podcast, and we talked about the lives of some of these Black residents of Britain historically, how she is helping to tell the stories about their lives, and how contemporary fictionalizations of Regency England capture these stories, or not.
Enjoy the podcast - and if you prefer to read, here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
Plain Jane
So, I have been poring through your books, and I really enjoyed Black London [among others]. And … it's just really beautiful the way that you write about what you're doing - reconstructing, repainting history. In a way, you say, to illuminate the unseen vistas of people and places that are part of British history and part of our world history. Really illuminating the stories of the people and the community of Black women and men in [the] Regency era in 18th and 19th century Britain. So would you just talk first, Professor Gerzina, about that, illuminating the unseen? In what ways has this history been erased? And in what ways are you still trying to uncover that history?
Gretchen Gerzina
So that book was published 25 years ago or so and it's still being read all the time. And in fact, it's available as a free download through the Dartmouth College Library. And it stays in people's minds. The reason I wrote it was that I was actually working on a very different book. And … I went into a bookshop, a very well known bookstore in London, looking for … Peter Fryer’s book called Staying Power, the history of Black people in Britain - massive book. And it had just come out in paperback. So I said, “Oh, let me go buy that.” And I went into the bookshop, and I couldn't find it. And I finally went up to a clerk. And I said, “I'm looking for this new this book. It's just been released in paperback.” And she looked at me and said, “Madam, there were no Black people in Britain before the Second World War.” And I said, “Well, no, that's not true.” .. .
So I got so angry. I never found the book. I mean, I went to another bookshop, and it was right there. But I got so angry that I went home and put aside the book I was working on and wrote Black London. Now, I wasn't the first to write about this. Other people have written about it. And I wanted to both consolidate some of their research, go back to their research, and really look at everything that I could find. And then try to tell the story of Black people living in England.
It was supposed to be called Black London. It was called Black London here but in England it was published as Black England. And of course, the reviewers all said, “Well, this is all about London. Why are you not calling it Black London?” which was amusing. …
But I wanted to make people see … that these people are walking the same streets, we're living in the same neighborhoods. And I wanted to make it a living, breathing history. Now a lot of other people are working on this now and have done for a long time. But when I first started working on it, there weren't as many. And it wasn't known. And even now, it's not so much that it's been erased, as has been forgotten. People didn't quite realize that there had been a Black British history that goes back as far as the Romans. And they're still finding, they're excavating, you know, old Roman encampments and finding Black African nobility women. And they are doing documentaries on it. I've been in a few. So it's become quite a well-known issue now. Although there's still a great sense of many British people wanting not to understand or believe that past.
I wanted to make people see … that these people are walking the same streets, we're living in the same neighborhoods. And I wanted to make it a living, breathing history.
Plain Jane
So I suppose, as you say, this was almost 25 years ago, that Black London came out. You've mentioned in the BBC series that you did, Britain's Black Past, you mentioned that it's a detective job … finding these stories. How have you managed to find the stories that you found? And what was it like putting that into an audio series?
Gretchen Gerzina
That was wonderful. And of course, it became a book, which was published when all the new research came out last year. So I was able to update a lot of the things … I've got to say - you're in radio - these producers … who have these independent companies and do the productions for BBC, they're incredible researchers. They sometimes find people that I hadn't been able to find, because we academics think in a very different kind of way than radio and television producers, who are out there finding people. So … I knew a lot of the people and we went to some of the places - but they were able to find some people I didn't know about. And then there were incredible stories … I think I was supposed to originally spend six months doing it. And then I was about to change jobs. And I only had one month. So I think I traveled all over Britain in one month doing the entire series. I would wake up in London and get on the train to Glasgow, spend the afternoon in Glasgow, come back to London. The next day, I go to Bristol, you know, kind of went on and on like that.
Plain Jane
That [sounds like] a really fun part of it.
Gretchen Gerzina
Yeah, it was very tough. … Going to some of these places to really stand in the houses or on the shore. … But it was quite an adventure, to unearth some of these stories. And to just see how, for many people, these stories still last. People still really care.
Plain Jane
What stories have fascinated you? What have [written about] so many individual stories that are wonderful to hear. But what have you found most surprising and exciting to discover?
Gretchen Gerzina
There's one - maybe it's one of the ones you're gonna ask about - which is Nathaniel Wells. And I resisted using that story. But they really pushed me because I hadn't really known it before. Nathaniel Wells was the son of a slave owner. He was mixed race. So he was the son of a [enslaved woman] and a slave owner. The owner … had daughters, but no legitimate sons. … He left this money to this mixed-race son ... He sent him off to England to be educated, as many slave owners did with their mixed-race children. And he went to boarding school and he studied. And then he died when Nathaniel was only 20 or 21, when he became the heir. He spent a lot of money. He was a young guy, and he moved to Wales to Chepstow. And he used the money to buy this enormous place.
He built this incredible house. He had acres upon acres of this scenic land that was so gorgeous, that it became a kind of pleasure ground. And people would come - there was an open day - and they could come and walk through the parks and all of the mountains, and it was quite something. But he made his money. His money came from the slave plantation. And in fact, his mother owned slaves, his mother, who had been herself enslaved, and I was very reluctant to tell the story of a - essentially a Black or mixed-race - slave owner living in Britain. He married a succession of wealth, to white women … and his house is a ruin now. But he became the first Black sheriff in Britain. He had this enormous wealth. He didn't die with a lot of money. But his story was one I never expected to find.
The one in my heart is always Ignatius Sancho, who's now been a play and everything.
Plain Jane
Why is he the one in your heart?
Gretchen Gerzina
Well, because he was so amusing and so serious at the same time.
He was brought as an enslaved child. He managed to get away, he was taken in by the Montague family, finally, away from these “three witches,” I think people call them now, who had owned him, didn't want him to read.
So they took him in, he was educated. And he became a butler in their house for many, many years. And then he was a little on the heavy side, and then finally couldn't continue to do all his work. So they gave him a pension, and some money. And he moved to London.
And he … set up a shop in Westminster, right near the heart of everything of the movers and shakers of British aristocracy and politics. And people would come into his shop. He married a Black woman, which was unusual at the time. And he wrote these letters, and he knew everybody. I mean, they would come in and talk to him. Laurence Sterne. He wrote to Laurence Sterne and [said], “If you're writing Tristram Shandy, please say something about slavery in there.” And he did. He had his portrait painted by Gainsborough. And it's quite a beautiful portrait. It's unfortunately in Canada - the British realize they made a mistake and are trying to get it back. I don't think they're going to get it. …
And he was just somebody that people were so fascinated with - all of his letters have been published, his son arranged that they got published after he died. And he’s still considered just a huge character. I mean, he … saw the Gordon riots and wrote about them in his letters. He knew people. And he was kind of the face of 18th century Britain in some ways, even though he's a Black man. He was also the first Black man ever to vote in England.
Plain Jane
So many of these people were close to influential people and so therefore having an influence. As you point out, they're the easier ones [to discover], and the people who are able to write their own lives are easier to unearth and to find. But so many of the experiences of Black residents in London during this time were below stairs or quietly or really by necessity a lot of the time having to be under the radar. ...
Gretchen Gerzina
It's hard because … for instance, the British census doesn't list race. When I first published Black London, some reviewers said that I should have gone to all the rent rolls and seen who was Black. But the rent rolls don't necessarily indicate race. It's really hard to find. But the same thing happens in America. … When my book Mr. And Mrs. Prince came out about 10 years ago - it was about two formerly enslaved people who lived in New England in the 18th century. It was a long time ago. And all the stories that had been written about them were written about other people, most of whom got the facts wrong. They claimed that their ancestor had freed them or things like that, that proved not to be true. I had a publisher ask me if I had a photograph of them. And I said, “There was no photography in the 18th century, you know, what do you expect?”
And… in general, you don't have your portrait painted, you don't have a journal, you're too busy getting on in life … If you're literate, you don't necessarily sit down and pen your memoirs, you know. You're just trying to get going. But on the other hand, there were people like Francis Barber, who was the servant of Samuel Johnson, and became his literary executor and heir at the end. And that was much disputed. And people were not very happy about that. So those kinds of people who were educated and were lucky enough to be known [we can learn about]. I actually think that the people who are finding out the most now are people you don't expect - genealogists who are starting to trace back family histories. A lot of white genealogists in Britain, they're finding that they have Black ancestors, and they didn't realize it.
Plain Jane
I’m a big fan of “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It seems like he ends every episode saying, “See how we're all connected? More than we thought we were?” … So yes, I hear you, that's really fascinating - that so many disciplines are sort of reevaluating and re-seeing, looking again, revisioning, all of this history. You’re reminding me, when you talk about no photography from 18th century Britain, you're reminding me that not only are you and scholars like you having to honor these unseen histories, but you're actually having to re-tell stories where there's been a campaign of basically very racist imagery. You write about the constant, reinforcing sexualization of Black women from these times; but then also the pro-slavery imagery and campaigns that were put out there. Even the sentimentality. You say that there's sort of two versions that even those that were anti-slavery at the time, were sort of overly sentimentalized versions, like we think of Harriet Beecher Stowe. And, you know, doing a lot of good work, I suppose, and having an influence; but yet, we need to revision those stories as well. And you mentioned that you're just looking for the real people. They're real people in real places. So [you are] … having to, as you say, repaint these people?
Gretchen Gerzina
Well, I mean, just remember it's all worked very differently in America, and in Paris. And the way that it's memorialized or remembered is very, very different. There were certainly Black people in Britain from hundreds and hundreds of years. But there was not slavery on their soil in the same way that it was here. So they were able to sexualize women by looking at the Jamaican plantations and what happens there with a lot of rape and a lot of punishments. But this is the country, Britain is the countries, I should say, where Black minstrelsy was a television show until the 1970s. Blackface minstrelsy was not only on television, but it was in all the private homes. But at the same time, in the 19th century Uncle Tom's Cabin was the biggest thing going. People loved it, it really spoke to them. So there was Uncle Tom wallpaper. There [were] Topsy dolls. So you would go into a child's nursery and there could be wallpaper and dolls.
So that sense that America was terrible, and “Look at us, we're so great. We abolished slavery before you did,” takes away the fact that for the most part, the British actually supported the American South in the Civil War. Because their cotton came from there that fueled their textile mills in the north of Britain. They didn't have the same kind of racism, it worked a little differently, but it certainly existed. But there were lots of people who were just living among them who were not necessarily known. They weren't necessarily in a book, and they were just sort of living their lives. And that's what I'm trying to write about now.
But also I just really want to have a shout out to some people who are working on these things now. Miranda Kaufmann's book, Black Tutors, really sparked a huge response. … It became a huge bestseller in England. And there was a lot of pushback when people said there were no Black tutors. And she would show them the images of the people, and then all the documentation, and they didn't want to believe it. I belong within a group that she started, that is looking into Black people in British portraiture, and trying to identify who those people were. And so far, the list has over 300 British paintings that have Black people in them - they're most often a small boy servant or something, but not always. And they're scattered all over. They're in private homes. They're in museums.
But there were lots of people who were just living among them who were not necessarily known. They weren't necessarily in a book, and they were just sort of living their lives. And that's what I'm trying to write about now.
So there is a kind of visual reality to all of this, where you can see the people and you can understand a bit about their lives. And so people are going into the records trying to find out, who were these people? Were they borrowed sometimes, some painter would say, “Oh, you know, he's got a Black servant, let's put him in the picture and bring him over to a bigger house for a while.” So you know, trying to track them down is difficult. But there's just more and more evidence of this ongoing presence.
Plain Jane
You point out now in in your works the way these stories have been played, have been part of popular culture through the ages. And I guess our culture - various cultures - have worked out the stories, have worked out some of these things, either effectively or ineffectively, on the stage. And so that brings me to where much of your research deals with - the Regency era, which happens to be where so many contemporary cultural retellings, fan fiction, and romance is taking place. And then of course, we've got Bridgerton. So let me just start with a general question. We're talking about what people typically miss, but how are you experiencing some of these cultural inventions?
Gretchen Gerzina
Yeah, you know, I'm enjoying the heck out of this stuff. Just like a lot of [us].
Sanditon, I can let go. It was, I felt, a travesty. It kept some of the book, but it actually just took things in a direction that I found very difficult. So, for example, in Sanditon, the Jane Austen novel - the fragment because it's incomplete - the heiress from the West Indies is Miss Lambe … She is not necessarily identifiably Black. They know she's mixed race. In the series, they made her a very dark-skinned woman to point out that she in fact was a Black woman. They wanted to make that visual sense very strong for people like “Oh, we're dealing with a Black woman here.” Whereas I think in Austen it was more subtle and probably more accurate about how somebody like her would have been seen.
But Bridgerton just went over the top, and I just thought it was fabulous. Because we do know that Queen Charlotte probably had some mixed-race background. She was the wife of King George III. So she's presented as a mixed-race or dark woman … But then by just making everybody in it, you know, it was like saying, “Okay, what if we recognize that all these people were there? And assuming that they could have made their way into the aristocracy, how would this world have looked?” And I think the visual treat of it all is just really great. And we all know that that is not how Regency England looked. But we can say, “You know what? I would like to see what this looks like. If this could have been true, what would it have looked like?” And of course, it's just like a visual feast anyway. It's not just the racial stuff. It's the clothes and the sets.
Plain Jane
Tell us more, Professor Gerzina, about Queen Charlotte. You did an entire Zoom talk event with JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, about these questions, and this sort of casting and Black Britain and its history. And there were hundreds of people on the Zoom. But you talked about Queen Charlotte, and the chat room just went crazy. … So it was very, very lively. So anyway, all of that to say - tell us about Queen Charlotte?
Gretchen Gerzina
She had … Portuguese family so that there were a lot of that movement between North Africa, the kind of what we would think of as North Africa today. But she probably had some ancestry through her Portuguese ancestors who might have been Black. When I was doing some research on Black people who left America and moved to Canada after the Revolutionary War, those who had become the British patriots, the Black ones, a lot of them went to Canada. So I was in Nova Scotia at a center there on Black history in the province. And I noticed they had - I think it was a picture of Queen Charlotte on the wall - and I said, “Oh, what do you think of that? Do you think she was part Black?” And he said that Princess Anne had come to visit many years before and had seen the portrait and was asked about it. And she said, “Well, everybody in the royal family knows she was Black.” So that means to me Meghan Markle wasn't the first. So there's some history there. It can't be necessarily proven, but it's pretty well seen as probably true that she had some Black ancestry, and her portraits do seem to indicate that as well.
But you know, the other one I really like is David Copperfield. And what you have to do in this - the same as in fiction - is you have to create a world that you will believe. You may not like all the characters, but you have to create a vision of a world that you are saying, “Okay, I'm, I'm willing to go into this world with you.” And see and believe. It's the willing suspension of disbelief, and I'm willing to do that. Do they create a world that I can believe in Bridgerton? We know it's fantasy, and fun, with some historical elements. And yes, I'm willing to throw myself into that world.
Plain Jane
I was a graduate student at UCL in London, during 1994 and 1995, and everybody was reading Cultural Imperialism. I literally saw people reading it on the tube in London. And I was falling in love with someone who was an Arab-English person with the name Saidi - close to Edward Said’s name. So I was as a grad student in literature and also wanting to dive into our views and our histories and how race plays into that. These conversations are still going. Edward Said even writes about Jane Austen. And he writes about Mansfield Park, and he writes - really similar to you writing at the same time - we need to investigate the unseen in these stories, tell the unseen stories, which is so much what you're doing, as well. So my question is - almost going on 25 years, are we getting any better at this?
Gretchen Gerzina
Well, you know, there's more being written and more being published all the time. David Olusoga’s books. And all of his television programs in England are very well known. He's quite the face of Black British history and studies now. Others have been writing about it for decades. But I think what's interesting is that there's still a kind of resistance to it, to believing it. There are several things going on. One is ... the report the National Trust put out recently, which ... hired some academics and some others to take a look at the colonial and imperial and slave connections between some of the National Trust houses. And I think they listed 93 houses in the National Trust that have some kind of connection. That wasn't to say that they were houses where there was plantation slavery or anything, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that the money that was earned either out of the slave trade, or out of imperialism, or out of colonialism. [It] funded and help build, and perpetuate those houses. A lot of the money that was earned came from, originally, from the slave trade and slavery, and all of those absentee slave owners who had plantations in the West Indies. But also, from the fact that when they, when slavery ended in the West Indies in 1807, that they decided to compensate the slave owners for the loss of the enslaved people who had lived on those plantations.
The enslaved people were not compensated, while the slave owners were. And a wonderful book and study done by Nicholas Draper, about the legacy of all of this showed how all of that money that was made from that compensation - built these houses. It funded the philanthropy; huge swaths of London were built based on that money. And all around the country. So they wanted to just say, “Hey, if you're going to come to one of these houses, this is great. You can look at it, you can see it, you can appreciate the beauty of it. You can see how the generations of owners contributed to the culture and the landscape and all of that. But in fact, you should recognize that the money came from colonialism. And also from imperialism.”
You know, the houses were filled with porcelain from China. They were built on land that used to be tenanted, but pushed the tenants off and made a beautiful landscape that made it look like it had always been there. And they had built these houses based on that money. When that report came out, the backlash was quite strong. People did not want to hear about this. They thought, “Why do we fund a National Trust, and it spends its money on being woke?”
Plain Jane
Interesting. They don't see it as factual. They don't see it as history. They see it as politics happening.
Gretchen Gerzina
Yes, they do. And there's also some work being done now on updating the curriculum in schools. So some more of this is being learned at a younger age.
Plain Jane
So when you say in 1993, and you've been doing this ever since, among many other things that you're reconstructing, you don't even just mean that figuratively. I mean, your writing takes us down the streets. And really paints a visual picture ...and I would add to that the landscapes of the houses. Also sugar and so much of the economic foundations are part of what I think Edward Said was calling the interplay. … You you paint a picture of, you know, Elizabethan England and … Regency England then as well, and then even Victorian Britain as being a very cruel and violent place. And I think that in many ways, our PBS adaptations [etc] really do [whitewash] these histories in so many ways. You also point out the cruelty, the disease. But what I want to say, besides the cruelty, the disease, and just the ignorance that was rampant in these times, that we tend to forget about - probably, thanks to our screen adaptations - it was there. You found a community of Black residents in London during these times - not just individual people who were famous; they were portrayed on the stage; they were recounted in stories; and many of them were musicians, writers, very fascinating individuals - but also a community. And that was you've talked about how difficult that was to unearth. Can you talk about how you uncovered this community and the difficulty of doing that?
Gretchen Gerzina
A lot of that came from people who had been researching this for quite a long time. In terms of community, there are people who've been doing tons of research since my book came out. And they have been finding people and they've been finding communities. We can't be sure how much of a community there was. But we do know that there were communities - people lived in certain places and certain areas, they were part of the fabric of the kind of working class. There were people that we call the Sons of Africa. Some people have questioned whether there were as many and met as frequently as was thought … But we do know that they were there.
“Hey, if you're going to come to one of these houses, this is great. You can look at it, you can see it, you can appreciate the beauty of it. You can see how the generations of owners contributed to the culture and the landscape and all of that. But in fact, you should recognize that the money came from colonialism. And also from imperialism.”
And it was interesting to just think of the fact that in all of these grand houses that had Black servants, that those servants in the households, they socialized with each other. Those servants were meeting in the kitchen. Those servants were talking. And those servants were marrying the white servants, because they were mostly Black men.
And then you get a sense of just this kind of other world where if Samuel Johnson is having dinner with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or with the great actors of the period, that their Black servants are probably hanging out, talking to each other. So there was a kind of network of people, definitely, who were living [among] them. And then, of course, after the Revolutionary War in America, when so many Black people had been convinced to fight for the British in exchange for their freedom. A lot of them ended up in Britain, that had been part of the promise. And so they came over in their hundreds.
Plain Jane
That's fascinating - I think that you pointed out that something like 20 percent, of the soldiers fighting on both sides in the Revolutionary War with America were Black soldiers. They came back to England. And then you also pointed out they were not allowed, they were actually banned from learning crafts, learning trades ....?
Gretchen Gerzina
I'm not sure that they so much were banned from learning trades; they just found it difficult to find work. And also if, if they were poor, it's not so easy to move around in England at that time. I mean, physically, it's difficult. But also, it's often difficult to find work. And if you, Heaven forbid, get sick and die, you can't necessarily be buried where you're living because you're not officially part of that parish. So it's a very different kind of system than we might [envision].
And so a lot of people who worked on the British side, and obviously on the American side, in the Revolutionary War, were not just soldiers but they were doing other things: They were guides, they were helping to lead them through different terrain; they were washing clothes, they were cooking. They were following them and giving them advice.And then they also did fight. So, yes, they worked in a variety of ways and the British said, “Hey, come on our side and we'll give you your freedom and we'll give you a pension.” And then, lo and behold, the British lost then, and they came.
Plain Jane
Okay. So: Dido Belle and Mansfield Park - basically thoughts on that? There's also the book The Woman of Colour and there's this experience of Francis Barber and some of the others that you've mentioned. But … what are your thoughts on Mansfield Park and is it possible that Jane Austen knew the story of Dido Belle?
Gretchen Gerzina
It's possible. I have to think about the timing of it all. So Dido Elizabeth Belle of course, has nothing to do with Mansfield Park, although her great uncle who raised her was Lord Mansfield, who made a famous court decision that a Black person could not be returned to slavery in Jamaica. And that was taken by many people to say that slavery was no longer legal in England, and people ran away and said, “Hallelujah.” But in fact, that's not what the decision was.
He also presided over the case of the Zhong [ship], where a slave ship had thrown over a huge number of people ... in order to collect the insurance. And he came down hard on that case. So Dido Elizabeth Belle was raised by him .. but a lot of research has been done since the film Belle was made. And a lot of that film took a lot of liberties with it. So Dido was mixed-race, and her mother was - [but] Dido was not - born into slavery. And that was a misconception. Her mother actually came and lived in England, near her, with her, for some time. And then went back to Pensacola, where she had been living in [an] old property. Dido was given some money, and so she was able to marry. But she didn't marry an abolitionist, like in the film. She married a man who'd been a steward to an important French family. And so that was still a high-up position, but it was not the big raging lawyer abolitionist [as in the film].
… And I think the biggest thing about it was that her portrait was just a double portrait of herself, and of their cousin. It became the cover of my Black London book - and was later re-used by The Woman of Colour. So there's a lot of interpreting this portrait that people try to do.
So I've spent a lot of time trying to track down the true story, to use the research of these other people who have done such a good job.
Plain Jane
What would you like people to keep in mind as they're watching and reading Regency era histories and romance?
Just realize there are real people behind some of this. We know now that Jane Austen was likely an abolitionist, although she didn't write political things in her novels. We know that in Mansfield Park there are mentions of - and we know that the money came from - slavery. And so there was some reference to sugar and some other things in there. So we know that she's aware of it. But she doesn't make it front and center, because that's not what she does as a novelist. But I think it's really good for people who want to read these books - [to know] that there was a more racially diverse society than people realized. And that there were Black people there. And that in the places where she went and lived - because she lived in a number of places, she had to move around a lot - that she would have seen people like this.
And so it's really good to remember that this was a very different world and people have now accepted it. And I think to understand and accept that, it makes it more interesting. It doesn't diminish it at all.
——-
Thank you for listening, reading and being with us, friends.
Let us know your thoughts!
Have you watched the increasingly diverse casts making up Regency and 19th century British stories like Bridgerton, A Personal History of David Copperfield, and Sanditon? What would you like to see more of in these retellings and screen adaptations? Want to know more about Queen Charlotte? Write us at [email protected].
If you like this conversation, feel free to share it!
And if you’d like to read more about Black life in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, here are some of the people and projects that Gretchen Gerzina mentioned during this conversation - enjoy!
* Gretchen Gerzina’s website: https://gretchengerzina.com//
* BBC program on Britain’s Black Past:- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wpf5v
* See: National Trust research into the connection to the slave trade in its great houses: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/addressing-the-histories-of-slavery-and-colonialism-at-the-national-trust
* The report: https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/documents/colionialism-and-historic-slavery-report.pdf
* All things Georgian - Gretchen recommends in interview: https://georgianera.wordpress.com/
* David Olusoga: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/magazine/features/david-olusoga/
* Dido Belle as Fanny Price: http://jasna.org/publications-2/essay-contest-winning-entries/2017/a-biracial-fanny-price/
* Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338309/staying-power/
* Mirands Kaufmann’s Black Tudors: http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/black-tudors.html
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Hello friends,
Today we continue the conversation with fabulous sisters Leah and Bea Koch, co-owners and founders of The Ripped Bodice, the romance-only bookstore in the Los Angeles area. They also work with Sony Pictures in the development of romance-to-screen adaptations. Bea Koch is the author of Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, which was published during the pandemic.
In the first part of our conversation we talked about Regency women, romance, racial diversity in romance publishing, history, and so much more.
And our conversation continues - in this edition, Leah and Bea talk with me about feminism and the romance genre and what it all has to do with Austen and with our lives today. Also, we got their favorite Jane Austen novels, some of the interesting retellings they love, and some of their favorite films and characters from Austen and the Regency era.
Enjoy this excerpt from our conversation.
Plain Jane
Let me ask something: You two are young and feminist, and bring ... in some ways, diversity, and also, you're very, very well educated. You've got fancy degrees … But you love romance. You love romance reading, you've always loved romance reading. So what draws you to romance? And also, do you feel like you are a typical romance reader? Are you an example of readers of romance?
Leah Koch
Very much. .. I think you have to spend - pre-pandemic - an hour in our store to sort of just see the parade of humanity that that comes through. I think that's something really valuable that the store offers that's just really different. I mean, obviously, not everyone's going to sit in the store ... people-watching. But I just feel like for so long there was this notion that romance readers are white women in their 60s - and not that they don't read and love romance, we have many wonderful customers of that age - but … to me the biggest thing that's wrong about the stereotypical romance reader is age. We really see 12 to 90 … just the entire entire age spectrum, whether that's young people getting interested in young adult books and sort of reading their first books that have kissing in them, or … one of the things I hear all the time is, “I just graduated from whatever, high school, college graduate, law school ...Now I get to read for myself again, and I'm going to return or start romance.”
Bea Koch
I hear that all the time. I think it's what's so amazing is to hear what's bringing people to romance now is what brought us to romance as young women. And that is that these books center internal thoughts of the characters. And as young women as young people - I'm sorry, this is not a gendered thing, but I will speak from my own experience as a woman - you're told your emotions are too much all the time. Don't be so loud. Don't be so emotional. Don't fall in love. That's the wrong thing to do. You're getting all of these signals from society that you're too much. And romance is about all that too much being like the best part. Yeah, emotion is the best part of a romance. And I always think of the movie Inside Out. Sorry, like, I’m off on another tangent! But when I saw Inside Out as an adult - it wasn't available to me as a child - I was like, “What an amazing movie for kids to have now, to be able to talk about all their emotions and really feel like that's important.” And to me as a young woman, my romances - [and] the relationships my friends were having - that was my whole world. And so to find a whole genre where that was the most important thing and was so central and never denigrated, it made romance so important to me. And I love to hear new generations finding it for that same reason.
Plain Jane
So you're bringing me now to a little bit of Jane Austen. So something that Jane Austen did that's so powerful is to center this interior life, feelings of a woman. She also made damn sure to make it a very intelligent woman - her heroines are the smartest people in the room. And Jane Austen is always there letting you know how whip smart they are.
Bea Koch
… They are surrounded by other women and we get to see dumb women and other smart women as well. Something I always love about Austen is I think you can see her own love for her sister in her writing. And in the way the sisters - of course, like Pride and Prejudice sisters - but in all her books, sisters and friendships play out. I think we even see it in romance. Of course, the central love story is so important. But many of my favorite romance novels focus just as much on the friendships surrounding the couple and the way love changes not only your relationship with your partner, but your relationship with your sister and your best friend. And if you're building your family and bringing all these people in, and I think the idea that Austen still to this day connects to people in that way and makes you feel instantly like those sisters our are your sisters, and you're in that drawing room with them and feeling their squabbles and their love for each other and how they'll be there for each other even when one makes a mistake. It's just so universal. Not only the love between Lizzy and Darcy but the love between Lizzy and Jane and - Leah’s favorite - Mary.
Plain Jane
Leah: Who's your favorite? Mary?
Leah Koch
Mary [laughing]
Plain Jane
You love Mary? Because you know, I actually kind of like Mary because she's the one - she's sitting and reading all the time. And she is a rebel in her own way. She refuses to be pleasant. And if she wants to be self righteous then she can. Why do you love Mary, Leah?
Leah Koch
She's so annoying … she's such an a*****e. I always picture her as Goth, like she would be like dressing Goth now. ...
Plain Jane
Love. It. She's Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice.
Bea Koch
I think Leah always associated with Mary because … of course, I'm always like, “I'm such a Lizzy.” Like I totally am. And then there's this other kind of version of which is Leah, which is like, “[I’m] the rebel. I'm not the cool one to be.”
I think the idea that Austen still to this day connects to people in that way and makes you feel instantly like those sisters our are your sisters, and you're in that drawing room with them and feeling their squabbles and their love for each other and how they'll be there for each other even when one makes a mistake. It's just so universal.
Plain Jane
Okay … now that we're on to Jane Austen. What is the relationship between Jane Austen and romance novels where you're concerned? Because, you know, scholars will tell you, Jane Austen was part of the Romantic period, Bea as you point out helpfully in your book, but was kind of anti-romance in some ways in her writing. She wanted women to think for themselves and she wanted us to carry our brains like armor, you know. So what how would you describe that relationship? She's influenced a lot of Regency romance. Would you say she has been foundational to Regency romance?
Bea Koch
I would certainly say she's foundational to Regency romance - I think not only in her actual stories, but literally the history of Regency romance is a pastiche of true fact and fiction. [Georgette Heyer’s] role, I think, in the history of Regency is really much more complicated than Austen because of some of the anti-Semitism and other stuff in her work. But she was an obsessive scholar of Austen and her research notebooks are her doing all this research on a lot of stuff she read about in Austen.
Leah Koch
Isn't there like a phrase that you said never existed but people think is real?
Bea Koch
Yes, there is. There are a couple things from Georgette Heyer’s work that contemporary romance novelists have referenced as though it is a true Regency fact. But it was made up in the 1930s by Georgette. And it's called, I want to say it's like the Bunbury Incident.
Leah Koch
That sounds right. Yeah.
Bea Koch
So I learned about this. When I was at Yale, I took a class about historical romance novels with two amazing authors.
Plain Jane
I wanted to ask you about this. You studied romance novels at Yale!
Bea Koch
It was one of the most amazing experiences, truly, of my life … But I found I was like, “Oh my gosh, I'm not the only person reading this. And I'm not the only person who really sees that there's something here that should be studied, like in an academic way!” And so yes, we read - I think it's a Loretta Chase - that references something from a Georgette Heyer, that didn't actually happen in the Regency. … It's like a wink and a nod to romance readers saying … this history is its own. That's not unproblematic. Georgette Heyer has serious anti-Semitism in her work, which as a Jewish woman, deeply offends me and makes me uncomfortable including her in the hierarchy, in the … bloodline, of romance. But the way these sources play on each other I think is so important in understanding our history, and how we got to where we are now.
Leah Koch
It's exactly what you just said, Janet. We're still having this discussion. Now. We still have it once a week, which is, “Can a book be feminist if it ends with, you know, the woman getting together with a man?” And obviously, romance novels now include people of many other genders who do not end up with just man and woman. But for now … we hear from people all the time, that are like, well, if she needs a man to be happy, then how is this feminist? And I feel that like, that was the exact question that Jane Austen was exploring, and romance novels still explore. And I think we have a lot of different answers to that question, depending on how annoying the person who's asking it is being!
[W]e hear from people all the time, that are like, well, if she needs a man to be happy, then how is this feminist? And I feel that like, that was the exact question that Jane Austen was exploring, and romance novels still explore.
Bea Koch
I think that goes back to that question of devaluing our life, right? Like, “romance is not important. And if you're writing about romance, you’re not writing about what's important.” Which is so interesting because to me romance is the most important thing. And if you're not writing about romance, what are you writing about?
Plain Jane
I feel like Shakespeare was writing about a lot of things, but he was also writing about romance. I think there's some sexism involved in that. And double standards involved in that. That we've all been influenced by. Those of us interested in reading and in literature are constantly having to deal with this devaluation of, basically, our lives and our experiences, and what matters to us and what makes the world go round.
Leah Koch
In some ways, [in] feminism, I feel like there's often these wild swings, from “only focus on your career … partners and children don't matter,” and then we wildly swing the other direction with, “If you want to stay at home and have eight children, that's what you should do.” And we seem to have a lot of trouble finding a place in the middle. And I think modern romance novels, I think certainly attempt to do that.
And I think good modern romance novels tend to be very holistic in their approach to the central characters' lives. So I think now, you know, and obviously in the past as well, but when you look at the bestsellers coming out of our store… the characters have a very interesting career, or it's in a really interesting setting. And it's just a very holistic approach that for some reason seems to freak people out - that you can both have an interesting career and if you so choose, fall in love at the end of it, and you don't have to go off and have a babies. But if you want to, you can, and then they will all get their own books.
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Thanks for listening, friends. Talk back to us! Are you a reader of romance that doesn’t fit the stereotypical mold? What romance books and authors have you discovered and love? Did you enjoy this conversation, or have a comment or question for Leah and Bea? Let us know - comment below, or email me at [email protected]. You can also find us on Twitter at @AustenConnect on and Insta at austenconnection. Stay in touch!
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
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Dear friends,
Our second podcast episode is out!
And it’s a treat. In this conversation with superb sisters Leah and Bea Koch, co-owners and founders of Los Angeles romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, we get into the questions about what Jane Austen has to do with romance (a lot, friends), diversity and equity in the romance business from representation to pay, and real women of the Regency era. (Spoiler alert: They’re mad and bad! ) In next week’s conversation we’ll get Leah and Bea’s favorite romance tropes and themes … not to mention some of their favorite Austen retellings. So stay tuned!
Those of us who are romance readers know that the romance industry is a billion-dollar industry with a huge demand in readers - including many of us in the Austen world, and also including Leah and Bea Koch themselves. The sisters say they have always loved romance novels. They also have serious academic degrees in their fields, and they work with Sony Pictures to find books that can be adapted for the screen.
So for these sisters, as for the industry itself, romance is serious business.
Bea and Leah have also noticed that like much else in our culture, the romance industry has a diversity problem - so they have produced an annual State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Report - gauging the numbers of books being published by BIPOC authors in traditional romance publishing.
Besides running a business through the pandemic, Bea Koch also published a book exploring little-known Regency women from marginalized backgrounds in her book Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency.
I caught up with Leah and Bea Koch by Zoom a while back. We talked about how the Regency era has been whitewashed not only in romance storytelling but in so much of our cultural discourse.
And when it comes to Regency stories, history, romance, how these stories are presented historically and how they might more accurately reflect the actual racial diversity of the era - they have some thoughts!
They began by talking about how challenging the pandemic year had been. But there was an upside - people from all over the world were joining their bookstore events, virtually.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
Plain Jane
So, Leah, it sounds like ups and downs, as you say [during the pandemic]. But one positive might be the community - people are searching out community, people are searching out books. Have you found increased interest or just sort of connecting?
Leah Koch
Yeah, well, and I think possibly one of the only silver linings is the real sort of expansion of our community on a global sense. Because I think before people were still excited about the store, but it was sort of like, “Oh, maybe when I go on vacation to California someday, I would get to come.” And I think we every once in a while did a live streaming event if the author really wanted to, but it just wasn't something that we did a lot. So now anyone can come to a Ripped Bodice event because they're all virtual. So if you live in Singapore, you can attend the virtual Ripped Bodice.
Bea Koch
And I think we're excited about - now that we've learned all that - using that to make us more inclusive, moving forward so that more people can attend our events in different ways and figuring out ways to make that exciting.
Leah Koch
I agree, I don't see virtual events just completely going away. I mean, we will return to some amount of in-person because it's fun. But yeah, that's been really nice to sort of include more people that way. And you know, make make them feel like they're at the store, sort of from people's living rooms.
Plain Jane
Yeah, that's great. I know, as a reader, I've really appreciated those kinds of events. Bea, you also, in addition to getting married during the pandemic, you've also published a book during the pandemic: Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency. And you explore Regency romance, actual heroines, actual Regency women. And you find that they're more radical and lively and more challenging and more colorful, and diverse in all kinds of ways - as was the Regency world - than people tend to think.
Why did you take undertake to broaden out our idea of the Regency with this book?
Bea Koch
I mean, my love of the Regency comes from Romance novels. And I am a “trained historian,” you know, I'm putting that in quotes - because, what is a trained historian? I went to school for it, and I studied it for a long time. But I think, like so many people, I have a real love of history from fiction. And what I was really searching for, as I wrote my book, was a way to talk about the fiction element that I loved so much: What it gets right, and then also, where it could expand.
And one of those areas, of course, is in featuring more women who are not white, Christian, cis-het women. And there are so many examples of people like that in the Regency who were thriving. And I was so thrilled to have the opportunity to highlight some of them in the book. There are the names that I think will be very familiar to fans of the period, and then maybe names that [you] may think, “Oh, I've heard of them, but I've never quite explored their story.” So it's really fun to dive into some of those.
Plain Jane
Well, who are some of those women who stand out for you?
Leah Koch
As a reader of the book in many iterations, but in its final iteration, someone I knew nothing about before I read the book was Mary Seacole. So that's my suggestion. Tell us about her.
Plain Jane
Well, why Leah? Why Mary Seacole?
Leah Koch
I just had never heard of her before. I mean, if you spend enough time around Bea, you will know a lot about queens. And I think there's a real - correct my history if I'm wrong - but obviously there's a very British focus to the Regency. But it did involve people from other countries.
Bea Koch
Yes, I think the Regency gets a little confusing for people. The Regency refers to a specific ruler and time in England when Prince George took over as Regent for his Father [from 1811-1820]. His father had succumbed to, potentially, a blood disorder and was exhibiting signs of what they called madness. So his son had to take over and there's a [approximately] 10-year time before he actually becomes King that he is the Prince Regent. And that tiny little 10-year period is this time that holds such huge sway in our imaginations for so many reasons.
And I love that you brought up Mary Seacole, Leah, because I think she's a great example of the way history can shine a spotlight on one woman. And in doing so, unfortunately, we lose the tales of the women around her. And so ... Florence Nightingale is a name that so many of us are raised with - this brave, young, privileged white, Christian woman who went to the frontlines of the war and started modern nursing as we know it. Right alongside Florence Nightingale was a woman named Mary Seacole, who had been trained by her mother who was also a doctor and she owned a boarding house, where she practiced her medicine - traditional techniques.
And Mary Seacole wrote an autobiography later in life, explaining her training through her mother, her search for education, her whole life and then her own journey to the Crimean War. And her contributions to the war effort, even going so far as to ask Florence Nightingale if she could join her battalion of nurses and being turned down. ...
Mary Seacole was British Jamaican. And Florence Nightingale was white and her battalion of nurses was all white. Mary Seacole was the first woman of color we have evidence [of] that … asked to join and was rejected. And in her autobiography, Mary Seacole writes very movingly of her experiences with racism, and she names it very clearly, what she's experiencing.
And then later historians kind of whitewashed Mary Seacole’s experience: “Oh, she couldn't possibly have been experiencing racism. … She didn't have the same training or she didn't have the same standing as Florence Nightingale's other nurses.”
She didn't let that stop her. Mary Seacole still went to the front, she still served as a nurse, and was beloved by the troops to the point where when she returned from the war, destitute … the troops organized to raise money for Mary Seacole for her to live on after.
So to devalue her contributions, not only to the war, but to the soldiers themselves, I think is is really sad. And there have been moves made to kind of reintroduce Mary Seacole into the story. And it won't surprise anyone to hear that some of those moves have been met with consternation by various factions, who see the elevation of Mary Seacole as a way to devalue Florence Nightingale, which I don't agree with. I think two amazing women doing great things can exist.
One could have exhibited racist behaviors, one could have experienced racism; they both could have contributed to the field of modern nursing.
And we need to discuss history with a little more nuance and awareness [that] all these different things can be true at once. For Mary Seacole to exist does not mean Florence Nightingale did not exist or did not contribute to the field of modern nursing.
Plain Jane
You know, it is interesting: There is this reluctance to “bother” History. But your book, Mad and Bad, is very lively, very vibrant, and it's contributing to this contemporary conversation about history. In Mad and Bad you talk about so many real women of the Regency that are Jewish, that are LGBTQ identifying in the Regency era, [that] are multiracial, and are living outside the bounds or the strictures. They're scientists as well. And they're thinkers and they’re writers.
I guess the question is: You mentioned whitewashing - what has contributed to this whitewashing? And you probably feel like you're just scratching the surface here. What do you want to see happening as we go forward, when we talk about the Regency and when we write romances and talk about romance novels?
Bea Koch
I mean, “scratching the surface” is a perfect example.
It's when I was doing the research for this book, there are 10 chapters on the cutting room floor … There could be so much more to be said about so many different women. And I think the popularity of the Regency in romance is something that is not going to change. And so what I would encourage is current creators who are engaging with that world: Do some research and understand that this whitewashed version we've been told is not the full story. And, in fact, in the stories that haven't been told, there's so much that would be just like catnip to modern audiences. I think about some of the stories in my book, and some of the stories that I didn't even get to talk about in the book. And the way they could be adapted into film or TV shows, I just think there's so many stories. And the idea that the Regency has been done and done, because we've seen so many versions of white and purely white casting adaptations, is just leaving so much history behind.
And so what I would encourage is current creators who are engaging with that world: Do some research and understand that this whitewashed version we've been told is not the full story.
Plain Jane
This is such an exciting and interesting conversation right now. … Let's unpack a little bit of these discussions that are going on: You say that so many of these are good screen stories. I agree, and [you two] are the people who turn these into the screen sometimes! So I want to talk about that role of development that you have in a minute. But let me first just ask: So what do you think of Bridgerton? And the diverse casting going on there? And what do you think of the [Georgiana] Lambe character, and Sanditon? What do you think of contemporary adaptations? And what are you seeing with all this right now?
Leah Koch
I think we're, we're just at the beginning. … I think I don't want to get too into a discussion of how Hollywood functions, because we'll fall asleep and be here for three years. But, you know, things just take so much longer to come to the screen that I think the average person realizes. So when somebody sees something like Bridgerton have a lot of success, and they're like, “Oh, great! Everything I see for the next year is going to be a romance novel.” Well, unfortunately, it's going to take a little bit longer than that. But I would say, it's a toss up for me. I enjoy seeing interesting adaptations of work. … I tend to fall more on the side of being interested in sort of newer creators. And in particular, you know, giving Black people the chance to tell Black stories and queer people the chance to tell queer stories. But I think both can coexist.
Bea Koch
I agree that we're just at the beginning. And it is certainly where we've always wanted. Since we opened the bookstore, we made no secret that we were looking for particularly historical stories that were more diverse. Because that's what our audience was asking us for. And that's literally why I wrote Mad and Bad. People would come into the bookstore, and I would recommend a romance novel to them and explain, “Oh, it's inspired by X, Y, or Z woman.” And then they'd say, “Oh, do you have a biography about her? I'd love to learn more about her.” And it just seemed like in romance, there's this real interest in the real history of the time, and in understanding that it has pushed boundaries forward in so many ways. And there's also so much more we need to do. So we can continue to ask for more historical romance novels that are not set in Regency England, 19th century, great. … there's so many stories to be told. I'm always surprised that we don't see more of that traditionally published. There is quite a bit that's independently or self published. But, I don't know, I would think that the publishers would really see that there's a huge market for interesting historical stories that haven't been told before from a different perspective.
Plain Jane
All right, let's hope along these lines.
The Ripped Bodice has started publishing the State of [Racial] Diversity in Romance Publishing report. Why did you so quickly jump on this report? What made you feel like it was needed and that this was something you had to do?
Leah Koch
Just to be clear, it is [on] racial diversity. We always want to make sure we're clear about that. Because we don't look at other ... forms of diversity. It has a quite narrow, focused goal. And I think we started because of exactly what we just said: It was really what our customers were asking for. And I think it was a very big change, for us to go from being enthusiastic romance readers to professional romance readers. That is essentially what we do. You just have such a larger picture … you might not be looking as widely at all the different publishers and sort of how the imprints function within them and who's doing what. It's just not something that most regular people pay all that much attention to. So when we entered the professional realm it was so obvious, so fast, that the supply was not meeting the demand.
[I]n Romance, there's this real interest in the real history of the time, and in understanding that it has pushed boundaries forward in so many ways. And there's also so much more we need to do.
And … I felt like for a long time, and to be clear, there has been improvement in the last five years. But I feel like when we first opened, that anything that someone would ask for, there'd be like … one. So it'd be like, “Do you have anything with a Black heroine and an Asian hero?” We'd say, “Yes, great, here.” And then they'd come back and be like, “Okay, what's next?” And we'd be like, “That was it.” That's just one specific example.
We felt like there was still this mantra from the publishers, and … it's kind of contradictory. It's on one hand, “This isn't as big of a problem as you're making it out to be.” And then on the other hand, also, “We're working on it. We are improving…”. And we felt like they weren’t improving or weren’t improving fast enough.
Bea Koch
I think we also realize that this is such a large, complicated conversation, and so many people are having it on so many levels. And our question was, “What is the piece of information that we can add to the conversation?” And to us, it seemed like, what we could do was count the number of books that each publisher - each major publisher - puts out by women of color, and by white women, which is just a part of the [process], that we've always viewed the report as a part of the conversation. This is a way to present these numbers, and then talk more deeply about what we're all doing to change those numbers. If that's something that we say we want to do, which many publishers continue to put out statements saying, “Yes, we really want to focus on this. This is something we really care about.” And then when it comes time, to really have the conversation about how best to do that - maybe, I'm sure those conversations are happening internally - but they also don't seem to be moving the numbers as quickly as maybe some people thought they would. So we're just suggesting that we might need to try other things.
Plain Jane
Yeah, it's like a very, very simple but yet powerful way of just drawing attention to something. And like you say, sparking conversation; giving people something to look at and just counting. Journalists know, counting can be a very powerful thing.
Leah Koch
Right? It's really, it's really simple. It's literally two numbers. … And we hope that's just the beginning. ...
Plain Jane
You both said, you've seen the needle moving a little bit. And I looked at the report, and it looks like there are some publishers like Kensington and St. Martin's Press, maybe? Maybe Carina? [that] have increased the numbers of BIPOC authors? What are these publishers doing in order to do that? If anything?
Leah Koch
It's a good question. First of all, you'd have to ask them. I think it's a variety of things. Carina specifically has different people in charge than it did several years ago. So, a lot of times, that's what you need.
Bea Koch
I think Kensington is always an interesting one. People always kind of ask us about that. And all we know from Kensington is that they really are a part of the conversation. They always engage with us about the report.
Leah Koch
They're super open. … I think it was last year, Publishers Weekly did a piece. And I think last year Kensington was either number one or number two. And they'd interviewed one of their editors. And she was like, “We have so much more work to do.” And that was, like, the number one person and then the number like 15 person is like, everything's fine. You know, a question I've always personally struggled with and don't know the answer to. Kensington has a lot of dedicated lines for Black authors, and just more generally authors of color. And people feel really differently about that. I think there's some people who who like it and some people who don't like it.
Bea Koch
… Harlequin for years had a separate line, called Kimani, where they published all their Black authors. They got rid of Kimani and said that they [merged] all their Black authors into their regular lines, which we've seen many Black authors appearing in regular Harlequin series.
I don't know how Kimani authors felt about that particular change. And I think those are the people who really are most important to talk to. I think it's important to ask - not that anyone is required to say this - but this is a business. We're talking about money: Were you paid more to write for Kimani, or were you paid less?
When #publishingpaidme came out, we saw very few white romance novelists share how much they are paid. … There's a huge part where we're encouraged to remain silent. “Don't talk about money.” Especially for women. “It's rude. It's vulgar.”
Why? … I mean, I could go on and on and you've heard it all before.
But if we're going to have a conversation about equity, It's probably helpful for people to have this information. And for people to continue to say, “I'm not going to share that for X, Y, or Z reason, when it felt like our Black colleagues were asking us to share that. It was a choice. I don't know. … I wish more people had agents, they felt like would back them up and that kind of thing. Because as authors, we're so siloed and isolated ...
Plain Jane
And I think that's been being encouraged, you know, throughout our culture right now. And so you two,] are tapping into a lot of these things. And just applying them in a very powerful way to the business of romance.
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Thanks for listening/reading, friends - and guess what! There’s more, with Bea and Leah Koch. In next week’s podcast episode and letter (which if you are a subscriber, will arrive right in your inbox) - we’ll talk with Bea and Leah about feminism, romance, LGBT and other Austen retellings, and complicated love interests.
Until then, have a romantic, wonderful week,
Plain Jane
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More reading and references:
The Ripped Bodice website: https://www.therippedbodicela.com/
The book! “Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency”: https://www.therippedbodicela.com/product/mad-and-bad-real-heroines-regency-bea-koch-signed
Ripped Bodice State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing report: https://www.therippedbodicela.com/state-racial-diversity-romance-publishing-report
J Stor Daily on the Regency era: https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-so-many-romances-set-in-the-regency-period/
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