Arizona’s own Jane Austen scholar argues the author wasn’t a reclusive spinster

Joe Wright’s 2005 movie version of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” celebrated its 20th anniversary this spring. The internet was full of Keira Knightley pics and Mr. Darcy memes, and the film was re-released to theaters packed with Austenites — often dressed in Regency-era attire.

It’s a testament to the lasting impact of the author herself, who still captivates readers worldwide nearly 250 years after her time.

And while you might have a prim and proper vision of Jane Austen in your mind, Devoney Looser is here to tell you, that was far from the truth.

Looser is an Austen scholar and Arizona State University English professor. In her new book, “Wild for Austen,” she argues Austen had much more than a small life in the English countryside and was much more than a quiet spinster who never married and instead wrote about the love stories she never lived out.

From her association with abolitionists to her penchant for making money, Looser paints a picture of a subversive, rebellious Austen. The Show spoke with her more about it — and why she hinges the book on the word “wild.”

Full conversation

DEVONEY LOOSER: I was looking at this word in her fiction, and it turns out that it's kind of a linchpin word, and it's often used to describe women and their behavior and their personal style positively. And I think this is really important to understand.

So in the book, I was looking at not only her writings and reassessing those for, I think they're legitimate wildness is how I'd put it, but also then looking at her life and the people surrounding her and that they weren't as boring and, you know, small and uninteresting as we've been told. And then finally at her legacy.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK, so let's start with a little bit about her own life. She was connected to the women's suffrage movement and to the abolitionist movement.

LOOSER: Not directly connected. I think connected through the people that she knew and the people that she was socially a part of groups with. So in her lifetime, we have this sense that she was completely unknown, and this is not true.

By the 1810s, when her books start to be published, she starts to get a reputation even though her name's not on the pages of her novels. Her reputation as their author starts to fly around so that the Prince Regent himself knows that Jane Austen is the author of “Pride and Prejudice” in these books and invites her to, or his royal librarian invites her to come see the library. We know that she did this tour of the library. The Prince Regent was a big gossip. I don't think there's any reason to believe that this was a secret.

So by the 1810s, she is hanging out with some pretty incredible people, mostly through her brother Henry. One of them, it turns out, was an international spy who was later assassinated. And you know, I think this is not the kind of person we imagine Jane Austen sitting in a drawing room with, but it absolutely was. And although some biographies give this a sentence or two, I wanted to see what happens when we give this and then the entire chapter, several thousand words, to try to say what would this have meant that Austen knew this international spy, and his opera diva wife? What does it mean that Jane Austen was hanging out with groups of radicals, and radical politicians and the women in their lives?

GILGER: That's so interesting, right? So, what's your conclusion there? What does it mean that she was associated with some of these people who were so radical at the time? 

LOOSER: Well, I think it's really interesting that she doesn't choose to write about them directly. I think that says something, and I'm not sure that we can say exactly what it says, but it says that this was a choice she made. And, not like, “oh, poor Jane Austen, she never married, and, you know, she could only imagine romance and she had to write about these small villages because she didn't know anything else.”

This was a deliberate choice that she made and an artistic choice. And I think that's important. It's not born out of limitation. It's born out of the sense perhaps of the audience she was trying to reach, the genre she was contributing to, and what she wanted to make her art.

GILGER: The word “savvy” comes to mind in a way to me that we would never have assumed of Austen. 

LOOSER: Yes, absolutely. And there's a line in her letters where she says, “I love pewter,” and what she means is I love money. She's glad she's making money from her writing. This was important to her as a novelist, as a woman who was dependent on the men in her family without this money.

I think these are all things that show us that she was an ambitious, and I think, a genius novelist. These were not things that she didn't understand about herself, and they are things that we should credit her positively for. A kind of wildness that I think she was willing to go outside of convention for what was ideal feminine behavior to create this life.

GILGER: Devoney, do you think of this as like a feminist interpretation of Austen in a way, because it seems to me that like history may have underestimated her or assumed in some way that her writings, her success, what she wrote about it was sort of almost an accident. 

LOOSER: Yeah, I absolutely see this as feminist or protofeminist. The word feminist doesn't really enter the language in the term we understand it, you know, in the form we understand it until later in the 19th century. But critics since the 1930s have been associating Jane Austen's fiction with feminism, but it still hasn't stuck with the public.

GILGER: OK, so I have to ask you about your process, right? Because I mean, you're an Austen scholar, this is what you do, but Jane Austen is so popular, like so well studied. It seems like such well tread territory. How do you do this? How do you discover new things about her and still surprise us today? 

LOOSER: It's a process. It's a really exciting research process, and I'm grateful to ASU for making it possible for me to travel to some of the world's best archives, as well as to have access to database, subscription databases that allow me to mess around online and find things that haven't been noticed before in 19th century newspapers.

GILGER: Tell us about that. Where did you go for this? 

LOOSER: Yeah, so there are many digitized newspapers, and I just started very deliberately looking for references to her brothers. And one after another, I found that first her brother Henry, then her brother Charles, and then her brother Francis had all publicly joined the abolitionist movement as activists in the 1820s in the near years after her death. And this is something that previous critics and scholars hadn't noticed. And so to be able to prove that her family had these connections, or at least half of her siblings have these connections, and then to speculate what that means for what we know about what Austen was doing 10 or so years before. And I think it shows us that there was a movement toward a kind of abolitionist mindset among her siblings.

Now, it is true that some of her family members, even some close family members, were making their fortunes off of the labor of enslaved people. So this is a movement, I think, in her family, away from the tacit acceptance of that, although they never benefited directly economically themselves. They, like many, benefited indirectly toward her siblings moving into a real anti-slavery, pro-abolition mindset and public movement. Because we've been told that Jane Austen's family was apolitical and conservative, I think a lot of people weren't looking for this. But I did look for the needle in the haystack and found it three times. So how do you like that?

GILGER: How do you like that. I have to ask you lastly, Devoney, about maybe the greatest debate about Jane Austen, although I know there are very many, which is the best version of her classic “Pride and Prejudice” when it comes to movies. 

The Keira Knightley version just had its 20th anniversary. It was re-released in theaters, a big hit once again, and lots of millennials my age were very excited to see this getting so much attention again because we loved it so much. 

But of course, there are camps in this realm in terms of which is the best movie version. What's your opinion? How do you weigh in here? 

LOOSER: So, I'm 58 years old. Colin Firth is my Darcy and probably always will be. But, my students tell me that that is not the case. That's their mother's Darcy, or, you know, pretty soon it'll be their grandmother's Darcy. You know, I get why this happens. Maybe the Darcy we first saw when we were young women when we came of age is one that imprints itself on us.

But I have to say I happened to be in California during that 2005 Joe Wright “Pride and Prejudice” re-release, and there was a ball, and I got to go to the ball. I don't know if you saw that, Lauren. It was amazing, and I loved seeing mostly a much younger audience and how excited they were. So I can make room for all of the Darcy's.

GILGER: All of the Darcys are welcome.