The Austen Connection

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.    Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

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! Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

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/ Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

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! Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

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!—--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 austenconnection@gmail.com - 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 If you are contributing as a paid subscriber to the Austen Connection, you are a member of the Charlotte Lucas Loyalty Club - and you rock. Thank you! If you appreciate this podcast, project, and the labor that goes into creating it, and would like to support the work, you can contribute as a paid subscriber and join the Charlotte Lucas Loyalty Club. You are also very welcome to sign up for the newsletter and join this community for free. The Austen Connection is free and available to everyone. Thank you for being here.  Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

Thanks for being here at the Austen Connection. You can see all of the Austen Connection conversations including the podcast here. If you are not signed up yet you can take a few seconds to sign up, below, to get all of the conversations dropped into your inbox. Thank you!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 RileyThe promise of the Happy Ever After. And you need that after you take a test for differential equations. Plain JaneYes! Is this what got you through grad school? Vanessa RileyYes. 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 JaneYeah, 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 RileyFor 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 JaneWell, 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 RileyThe 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 RileySo 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 RileyAnd structure from Shakespeare. So there we go -  the perfect match!Plain JaneWhat attracts you to the Regency period, specifically and Regency stories? Vanessa RileyI 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 JaneI 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 fou

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 JaneI 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

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 JaneLet me talk a little bit first about Persuasion. So why do you love the story of Persuasion?Damianne ScottWell, 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 JaneYeah, 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 ScottOh yeah. Plain JaneSo, whole thing. And I kind of resented that, you know? So what was your experience? What  has been your experience in the church?Damianne ScottSo … 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, m

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 JaneSo 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 DeBlassieSo 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 JaneWhat 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 JaneWell, 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 DeBlassieSo 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 unsuperv

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 Blassie, 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: Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

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 JaneI'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 JusticeI 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 JusticeTo 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 JusticeGood for me.Plain Jane Yes. Well, is Emma your favorite novel of all time?George JusticeOh, 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 JusticeI don't know if it was about the subtext. I think it was about Fanny Price. Plain JaneYou 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 JaneI 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,

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 cri

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 ChristmasSometimes 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 cont

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 JaneSo, 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 JaneSo 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 GerzinaThat 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 GerzinaYeah, 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 JaneWhat 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 GerzinaThere'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 JaneWhy is he the one in your heart?Gretchen GerzinaWell, 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

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 JaneLet 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 KochMary [laughing]Plain JaneYou 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 JaneLove. 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 JaneOkay … 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 KochYes, 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 JaneI wanted to ask you about this. You studied romance novels at Yale!Bea KochIt 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 impor