Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  If you’re especially lucky, you will meet Julia Matson and her collection of “Bingley’s Teas,” a line of globally sourced, exquisitely flavorful infusions and leaf concoctions that could make a tea-obsessive of even the most American reader; her blends are often named for the Austen character whom each evokes. “Lydia Has More Fun,” for example, is a caffeine-free tisane that tastes “flirty, flaky, without the usual substance of common sense,” while “Mr. Darcy’s Pride” is an “elegant and dark” oolong with “a bold beginning yet a smooth finish.” On special occasions, Julia surprises her favorite customers with secret packets of Lapsang souchong in the mail, while at conferences, she dispenses samples before a mischievous poster of a very arch-looking Frenchwoman in an Empire-waist frock with a strap hanging boldly off one shoulder. The only text on the poster is in a large, stylish font: “Jane Austen was a loose woman too.”

  Julia has been scolded for this poster on more than one occasion—I’m assuming mainly by people who don’t get the wordplay with “loose tea,” which is what Julia sells. The year I met her, at a meeting in Montréal, a woman dressed her down in a manner worthy of Lady Catherine de Bourgh upbraiding a slovenly seamstress. The woman’s argument, as best I can recall, was that Austen was not a loose woman and indeed would never have worn such a frock, and that commodifying Dear Jane into a sex kitten merely to sell high-end tea constituted an assault of the highest order. We were unable to confirm whether this firebrand critic had leveled similar censure toward the erotica peddlers who sat just a few tables away.

  “It is remarkable,” Julia wrote me, toward the end of a long and hilarious string of text messages in which we rehashed this encounter, “that there exist Janeites who possess absolutely no sense of humor.”

  Julia is right to consider such a reaction remarkable—the poster is essentially PG—yet the battle over who Austen was, what she would approve, and, yes, even what she would wear, has been raging for ages. While priggish Janeites (I have found) are relatively rare in the contemporary world, their lineage is long and august. This mode of hagiography began essentially as soon as Austen died in 1817. That same year, her brother Henry prefaced the posthumous release of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey with a decorous “Biographical Notice” that described Austen’s life in pious terms, one of “usefulness, literature, and religion.” We learn, too, that Austen enjoyed Samuel Johnson’s moral writings and admired Samuel Richardson’s command of character, while distrusting Henry Fielding, in whom “neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.” This little bio of Henry’s reads as a tacit family disavowal of any potentially subversive elements in the novels—a strange and sanitizing beatification, like the addled panegyrics that Roman poets used to write upon the death, and alleged apotheosis, of murderous emperors.

  Henry’s biographical notice struck at least one segment of his sister’s audience as narrow and uptight, and before long, the earliest generation of Janeites was rebelling against this sterile and unsatisfactory account of the novelist. In 1821, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine responded to the ongoing beatification of Austen in a column of Austenian verve:

  We have never read of such perfection elsewhere except in epitaphs, and though we know that de mortuis nil nisi bonum should be uttered, we confess we wish her biographer had recorded some fault, and if not exactly a fault, a failing, a weakness, a peccadillo of the most frivolous character, such as daintiness in eating, or nervous fidgeting, for then we might have pictured her as a mortal woman, with a coalscuttle bonnet, sandaled shoes, and mittens of the period, but now we can think of her as nothing less than an angel writing novels with a quill plucked from one of her own wings, and unfortunately there is no known likeness of her to dissipate the idea.

  Of course, the modern Janeite now has access to at least one likeness of the novelist, though this is hardly better than none; in the miniature watercolor sketch, attributed to her sister, Cassandra, Austen’s features appear sharp and slightly pinched but pretty and not inelegant; the family apparently agreed that it was unflattering. When Jane’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published his Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, the publishers commissioned an engraving based on Cassandra’s sketch; examining the engraving, James’s younger sister Caroline said: “There is a look which I recognize as hers … though the general resemblance is not strong.” As Claudia Johnson writes: “The image gives a characteristically paradoxical impression of being at once definite and faint, solid and imminently evaporable.” The modern reader, then, has only a weak idea of her resemblance, and Janeites in general are content to accept the Cassandra miniature as a sort of coloring-book cutout or paper doll, which we can shade and texture and dress however we like.

  It is important, I think, that the editors of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine should focus so closely (and virtuosically) on clothes in this passage, and I love the idea that Austen’s mortality is somehow contained in her coalscuttle bonnet—the notion that a simple swatch of her clothing could tell us more than Henry’s whole memoir. This was 1821; just four years after her death, Austen had entered the popular imagination as a formidable and vanished genius, whom you could recover if only you knew the cut of her frock. I don’t blame the editors for this reaction; it is a cold, pious, almost unfeeling Jane with whom we’re presented in her brother’s memoir, a figure that hardly squares with the light and liveliness of the novels. Purity and saintliness are found only in abstraction; imperfection and character are found in particulars. Much like modern Janeites, many of Austen’s earlier readers wanted to see past the saint, and to know all the particulars. They—we—want to know the cut of the dress. And we definitely want to know the ratio of furled to unfurled umbrellas in the novels.

  Still, throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Austen was installed in the pantheon of English letters both as a sort of mannequin for English virtue—a moral-didactic paragon—and as the laureate of a lost age of English order and excellence, who offered a languorous vision of nostalgia that Brits, weary from war, could slip into like a warm bath. By the mid-nineteenth century, English and American pilgrims were earnestly processing from Boston or Birmingham to visit Austen’s grave at Winchester, and after J. E. Austen-Leigh published his Memoir in 1870, the number and frequency of these pilgrimages only increased. “Jane lies in Winchester / Blessèd be her shade,” as Kipling writes in the epitaph quatrain that serves as prelude to “The Janeites,” and I have a hard time believing that the echo of the Lord’s Prayer is accidental. Kipling’s grenadiers, of course, are not of the escapist class—they are firmly lower- and working-class—but Kipling’s verse lines remind us of the bourgeois atmosphere of retrospective worship that attended Austen between 1870 and the Second World War.

  This priggish view of Austen prevailed until the 1930s and ’40s, and one of the most important turns came not from Forster or Chapman but from a psychologist named D. W. Harding. In 1940, Harding pilloried Austen’s more humorless worshippers in an essay called “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” in which he observes that Austen’s “books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked.” This is the sort of line that should give any conscientious Janeite pause. In Harding’s view, the idea of Austen as a model of virtue and a preserver of national character was a thin piety that erased (or sought to erase) the more corrosive or critical elements in the novels, all while disclaiming their author’s sense of vital, vicious fun. Such pieties are inimical to a full and proper enjoyment of Austen, and Harding wanted to recapture her from the stuffy moralists and the middlebrow worshippers. He would rather have Austen read by “those who would turn to her not for relief and escape but as a formidable ally against things and people which were to her, and still are, hateful.” Harding’s argument is at heart anti-Janeite—he rails against the supposedly soft, acritical stance of fandom, while also suggesting that Austen studies had been too feminized, t
oo much about pleasure and identification and not enough about manly, analytical rigor. Still, he makes a good point. If all you’re seeking is a saint to comfort you, Harding argues, you’ll miss the ambivalences, the really difficult and rewarding contradictions of the novels. “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked,” Austen once wrote in a letter to her sister. Yet we’re still making those pictures and still chastising those whose pictures of Austen are otherwise.

  Like Julia, Harding finds remarkable the irony that there are Janeites who seem to have no sense of irony about themselves, no apparent glee for mischief, no inner Lizzy Bennet.

  Each generation has always dressed Austen as it saw fit—indeed, within each generation, the individual reader will always fashion Jane depending on the way we first encounter her, and on our own particular prejudices. Part of being a fan means recognizing that Austen belongs equally to all of us, even as we feel viscerally that everyone else has got her utterly wrong. Like all fans, we are by necessity irrational creatures. It is lovely to have one’s enthusiasms endorsed, and the more arcane the enthusiasm, the more welcome the endorsement. Still, Janeites would not be Janeites without squabbles over the text and how to interpret the Word, so factions inevitably appear: one visiting Janeite will insist on Austen’s youthful Jacobitic conservatism, or else play up the protofeminist subversion most pronounced in the Juvenilia and perhaps her final, unfinished novel. One visitor will stress Austen’s late-life conversion to English Evangelism, and another will counter that Austen was a quiet Anglican who could address adultery without sermonizing. One bloc will call her a shy, retiring maiden-aunt, while others will say (much more the vogue these days) that Austen was a woman whose perspective, if not her itinerary, was cosmopolitan, formed by reading international newspapers and receiving detailed letters from two globe-navigating sailor-brothers. Seth Grahame-Smith has reimagined her, lucratively, as a zombie slayer; Julia has reimagined her, archly, as a “loose woman.”

  This mode of correctivist biographical criticism is not, of course, unique to Austen scholarship, but our fashioning of Austen always seems to involve higher stakes, or at least a more passionate audience, than it does with other authors. A professor of mine once noted, “You don’t see bumper stickers that say: ‘I’d rather be reading Tolstoy.’” The annual Jane Austen Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, features a shirtless, bare-knuckle boxing match—the sort of country entertainment that was popular in Austen’s day. Spectators are dressed, without fail, in full Regency regalia. As a vulgar Janeite once whispered to me, during a particularly spirited Janeite parade in Montréal: Where else on earth could you see this shit? The answer is, nowhere—not even at a Byron conference.

  Possessiveness over our picture of Jane has always been part of our inheritance as fans. Writing about the Chapman editions of the novels in The New Republic in 1924, Virgina Woolf complained: “There are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.” Julia and I consoled ourselves with this bracing, evergreen truth while we gossiped about the woman who had taken such exception to her “loose woman” poster. We agreed that Jane’s brother Henry had his revenge after all, in those few remaining Janeites who feel a righteous fury when they see a portrait of Austen in a come-hither dress—who resent any cosmetic slight against their picture of perfection.

  * * *

  The graduate students and a majority of the civilians attended our first round of dance instruction on Friday in Gerrard Hall, a great two-story oblong building, seemingly designed for the elegant length of a Regency cotillion. The balcony, which runs along three walls, is an ideal viewing gallery, and several of the children had already staked their claim to the most desirable seats. Jack Maus, a deadpan instructor supplied by the Regency Assembly of North Carolina, led us through such dances as the “Physical Snob” (perhaps my favorite) and the “Duke of Kent’s Waltz,” which Maus described as “not a waltz at all because you’re not allowed to touch!” Maus is an old hand at this sort of thing—there is significant demand for his brand of instruction, and academic Austen gatherings constitute a minority of his business; far more frequent are book-club galas and seasonal cotillions for historically minded hobbyists. Like so many of the weekend’s visitors, he is a fixture in the great year-round cycle of Regency cosplay and general Austen worship that often remains invisible to the uninitiated.

  Throughout the hour-long workshop, Maus’s directives were no-nonsense, stentorian. “This will be much simpler if I am the only one talking,” he would say into his body mic, and also: “Please, my good people, stop dancing. Listen. Watch.”

  One or two ladies spoke under their breath about what Maus could do with his directives, but largely we were an obedient flock, and Maus shepherded us through “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot” and one or two other numbers until we could reproduce them in tolerable fashion, if not with utter grace. The younger generation (I include the graduate students here) seemed more comfortable on the twirling, kaleidoscopic dances; the stationary foot maneuvers required to “set” in most dances proved far more befuddling. For those of us wearing our costumes, whether in whole or in part, there were added layers of distraction.

  Many of the die-hard attendees quickly mastered their moves, and I began to feel like the worst kind of impostor. I consoled myself afterward by staging tableaux with Ashley, now wearing her Caroline Bingley outfit, which was in fact the wedding dress in which she’d just been married. We amused ourselves for fifteen minutes taking photographs of each other and eventually arrayed Ashley across two or three chairs to effect a sort of time-lapse swoon. In the penultimate shot, she fans herself as a dire expression clouds her features. In the final shot, Caroline Bingley is suddenly operating an iPhone, texting with her husband, transported from 1813 back to the present and, by tenuous satellite connection, to a unit in the Middle East. “I’m so sorry, Caroline Bingley should know to put her phone on vibrate.”

  I told her that was silly, and that she should talk to her husband, but the sense of dislocation was strong, and my own phone suddenly felt very foreign in my hand.

  A tiny child bounced past us outside Gerrard, repeating: “We shall see you at the ball! We shall see you at the ball!” The silent auction had begun. “The winners will be announced tomorrow evening after the harpist has finished playing,” Inger said, as though announcing the time. Ashley rose from her swoon to accompany me in the direction of Pemberley, where further time-travel preparations awaited us.

  * * *

  There’s a major irony to these Austen gatherings, and it’s not merely D. W. Harding’s indelible burn against Janeites—that the mass of us represent “precisely the sort of people whom [Austen] disliked.” The irony is the idea that it’s useful, virtuous, or even acceptable to dress like your favorite literary characters. The costumes are at the center of the lettered enthusiasm that drives Janeites toward one another, but Austen herself had expressed specific distaste for this very sort of literary emulation. The passage I’m thinking of appears in a pair of letters that Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, in 1796. In the first, dated January 9, Jane tells Cassandra that she has been flirting with a young man, her “Irish friend,” a distant cousin named Tom Lefroy. It is one of the classics of morning-after literature:

  You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we call
ed on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago.

  The playacting here is lovely—when Austen writes about flirtation, her style inevitably becomes lighter and more teasing—and the technique of this letter, like so many of the others, shows us a lot about how Austen went about creating fiction. (She was twenty when she wrote this and had just completed a revision of Pride & Prejudice.) Even in corresponding with her sister, Austen is panoramic and psychological; she captures the competing attitudes of the room and casts herself and her admirer through the eyes of the onlookers—their quite-conventional behavior (dancing and talking) assumes the proportions of a neighborhood scandal, worthy of the first volume in any of her novels. Austen’s letters are full of similar social tableaux, and their double charm is that behind the arch front that her style presents lies an earnest truth. Even as she performs a sort of mock-mortification, she betrays a very real enthusiasm, for the ball and for the young man. It’s small wonder that Chapman claimed to reread the letters for pleasure. Once you’ve exhausted the novels and the Juvenilia, a true Janeite will find that the letters are nearly as reliable in their delights.