Jane Austen more 'wild' than people realize, says ASU professor
ASU English Professor Devoney Looser is photographed in her Phoenix home. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU
Turn-of-the-century English novelist Jane Austen is often thought of as a prim and proper figure, in part due to the social settings of novels like "Pride and Prejudice."
Devoney Looser knows better.
The Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University has studied Austen’s work — and her life — for years. She’s the author or editor of 11 books on Austen and a series of video/audio lessons titled “The Life and Works of Jane Austen.”
Her newest book, “Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane,” which re-examines her life and reputation, will be released Sept. 2 to coincide with 2025 being the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth.
ASU News talked to Looser about the book, her fascination with Austen and how her latest research uncovered that Austen’s siblings were involved in the abolitionist movement.
Note: Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: What prompted you to write the new book?
Answer: I wanted to do a project for Austen’s 250th anniversary. And I really feel all my work on Austen has led up to this book. It’s a mixture of commentary on her writings and her writings themselves. It also is about her social circle, and the last third of the book is on her legacy, her afterlife. All of the things that had turned her into an icon.
Q: How does this differ from your 2017 book, “The Making of Jane Austen?”
A: The 2017 book was completely about her legacy. Especially looking at the pop culture parts of it that I think had been overlooked or not looked at closely enough from the early Victorian era up until (actor) Colin Firth (who starred in the 1995 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice"). I was looking at the artists, activists, educators, directors, actors, playwrights — all sorts of people who were making things out of Austen and her stories and hadn’t really gotten a lot of credit. They had been called lightweight or unimportant, when they had been noticed at all.
Book event
ASU Book Group: ‘Wild for Austen’ by Devoney Looser
Thursday, Oct. 23
Noon–1 p.m.
Hayden Library, Tempe campus (with an online option)
This book is taking a particular look at the wildness in her writings. I think there’s a lot more than people realize. There’s this reputation of her as prim and proper that you can’t just quite move beyond when you’re having conversations with people who haven’t read her stuff from front to back.
Q: Why did that reputation take hold?
A: She had a brother and then a nephew who said things like, “She lived a life of no event.” Sort of the idea that nothing happened to her. But I went back and tried to find the things that really popped in her life.
Q: Can you give me an example?
A: We know she had a run-in in London with an international spy who was later assassinated. That maybe gets one sentence or two in the biographies, but I was able to give it a full, fleshed-out chapter. What does it mean that Austen sat in a room with this guy, who was an international spy, and his wife, who was a famous opera diva? This is not the Jane Austen we think we’re talking about. But she knew really interesting people who lived kind of wild lives.
Q: How was her writing possibly different than the perception of who she was as an individual?
A: She’s not writing these novels where men gnash their teeth and are these kinds of gothic heroes. That’s not the kind of wild she was. Her writings are looking at ways women are taking intellectual, independent and more expansive roles. They’re full of social criticism, and incredibly full of men who like smart women, and smart women who deserve us to cheer for them.
Q: You discovered in your research that three of her brothers were involved in the abolitionist movement, right?
A: That’s one of the things I’m most proud of. The work that I’ve done over the last several years is trying to really flesh out this question of Austen’s family politics. People would say her family was Tory conservative, but basically not politically active. That’s just not true. That’s another Victorian story I think that later generations just decided to tell about the family, probably for propriety’s sake.
What I found was that three of her brothers were engaged in public activism in the anti-slavery moment after she died. And her brother, Henry, was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. These are facts. So, does that prove Austen herself was politically engaged in the anti-slavery movement? No, but it suggests there was a family environment, at least among the siblings she was closest to.
So all these small moments in her novels that refer to slavery and slave trade enslavement … we don’t know how exactly to read them because they don’t hit us over the head, but knowing that about her three brothers, I feel we can be more confident believing that she was a part of the conversation around abolition and anti-slavery in her late life.
Q: Final question: What is Jane Austen’s legacy?
A: When I read her books, I see stories about characters in difficult situations that allow us to think about what it means as an individual to live a meaningful life in a world that’s deeply unfair. She should be enjoyed as a genius, but also give many of us an (idea) about how to live that meaningful life in a deeply unfair world.
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