Hello friends,

Enjoy this special podcast episode from a fun and meaningful conversation broadcast from our live taping at a one-day conference, “Everybody's Jane Austen.” 

This special symposium was hosted and produced by the Jane Austen Society of North America's Metro New York region. It was recorded live at Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, in Manhattan.

It was our honor here at the Austen Connection to speak with two amazing people on the front lines of Austen dialogue: JASNA director Renata Dennis, and Producer Tia A. Smith.

Renata Dennis serves as the Georgia Regional Coordinator and on the board of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and she also serves on JASNA's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee.

So Renata is on the front lines of discussions about equity, diversity, and inclusion in the Austen conversations and scholarship. 

Tia A. Smith is a film producer who develops what she calls “culturally shifting projects that leave lasting imprints.” These lasting imprints that Tia Smith produces include more than 3,500 hours of television and film, with 15 movies, two documentaries, and four major awards shows to her name. 

Tia A. Smith also executive-produced the most recent film and television adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the February 2024 production for Hallmark Channel as part of its Loveuary month of Jane Austen. 

Enjoy the conversation. 

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Thank you to the Everybody's Jane Austen organizers, Sarah Rose Kearns and Fran Winter and the team at JASNA's Metro New York Region. This episode was taped live at Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, in Manhattan.

Cool links and research:

* Here’s more about Hallmark’s 2024 Sense and Sensibility film

* The Race and the Regency Lab and its director, scholar Dr. Patricia Matthew

* Historical Regency-era heiress Dido Elizabeth Belle

* Belle the movie

* Author Vanessa Riley writes historical fiction drawing from real lives and deep research on 18th and 19th century Black history. She also talked with us for this Austen Connection podcast episode.

* Historian Gretchen Gerzina has written several books unearthing the lives of 18th and 19th century Black British figures and communities.

* Professor Henry Louis Gates’ series of books

* UK Historian David Olusoga produced an extremely moving and all-encompassing series on Britain’s Black past, Africa and Britain: A Forgotten History, available to stream on Amazon Prime

* UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, and the educational initiative “Colonial Countryside: Reinterpreting English Country Houses” - insightful historic companions to our readings of Mansfield Park  

Coming this spring from PBS Masterpiece - Miss Austen! This is a television adaptation of Gill Hornby’s book Miss Austen, starring UK actor Keeley Hawes, who happens to be married to another actor named Matthew Macfadyen whom some of you may know of. (😉)

* Music for the podcast episode is by: Nico Staf, Patrick Patrikios, RKVC, and we went out with music by Amy Lynn and the Honey Men, all from YouTube’s Free Music Archive or De Wolfe Music.

If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to share it and also leave a review!

Hello, friends!

So: Does Jane Austen even do happy endings?

It’s a very fair question! And one we’ve explored at the Austen Connection - and now diving deeply into this question is a fascinating new book: Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness is just out, from Hopkins Press. 

Professor Inger Brodey is the founding director and co-host of the marvelous conversation, dialogue, and seminar program Jane Austen & Co., and many of us here at the Austen Connection have engaged with their conversations series such as Race & the Regency, and also their seminars from the Jane Austen Summer Program. 

And now with this new book Dr. Brodey has produced a deep study on Jane Austen’s endings: How happy are they really, and what’s she doing with them? 

The answers are surprising: They involve token survivors, metafictions, ambiguous resolutions, and crashing the fourth wall where Austen’s narrators slow down the pace of the narrative, peer behind the veil of fiction, and talk to us. The reader.

If that all involves aspects of Jane Austen’s stories you’ve never thought about before - stay tuned. Author Inger Brodey is a highly original thinker and scholar, and this conversation explores Jane Austen as not only a young woman of the Regency, and as a weaver of these classic, iconic stories we know, but also as: an Artist. 

This is all in the conversation we’re honored to have with Inger Brodey in our latest podcast episode. You can listen here and wherever you get your podcasts - and if you prefer reading, here’s a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited. 

Enjoy the conversation! 

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You can find more discussion on this podcast episode at the Austen Connection, at austenconnection.substack.com.

Links and mentions:

Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness is by Inger Brodey, from Hopkins Press.

More on Jane Austen & Co - Many of you here already know Dr. Inger Brodey from Jane Austen & Company’s wonderful research and conversation series, or you may have engaged with the popular Jane Austen Summer Program.

Also discussed in this conversation - Dr. Brodey’s favorite Austen film adaptations, which are explored in her book, including: Autumn de Wilde’s EMMA. 2020 film, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (of course!), and an unexpected favorite, Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy, by Andrew Black.

You can listen to this conversation and all our conversations at the Austen Connection podcasts right here, and wherever you get your podcasts.

The late scholar Alison G. Sulloway’s book is Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood - it’s a big fave here at the Austen Connection.

Professor John Mullan’s book is What Matters in Jane Austen.

Further discussion- here are some Austen Connection archive posts on Austen’s HEAs, Austen’s Token Survivors, and Austen’s Fleabag-style breakage of the fourth wall. Enjoy.

The Mis-Arrangement of Sana Saeed just like Jane Austen’s 'Persuasion' is all about family pressures, class pressures, societal pressures - all the pressures - navigated by two people who once innocently fell into fast love with each other, and are now reunited, amidst conflict and tension. They navigate all that conflict, all that tension, all those pressures, and find their way to each other. 

It’s a debut novel from Noreen Mughees, a writer and an engineer specializing in environmental policy. For her day job Mughees works on environmental justice for under-served communities and immigrant communities, and, as it does in Austen, that kind of conflict and examination of power structures also comes out in this book. And so does the romance! 

Just like her heroine Sana Saeed, Mughees is navigating life, love, Muslim family and community, and environmental justice issues in her work - and it all comes out in this book. We spoke with Noreen Mughees about The Mis-Arrangement of Sana Saeed as the book was launching, earlier this month. Enjoy this Austen Connection episode featuring our conversation with author Noreen Mughees.

Music for this episode of the Austen Connection podcast is by: Nico Staf, Patrick Patrikios, on YouTube’s free music archive.

You can see more conversations and community about Jane Austen at austenconnection.substack.com. See you there!

Just in time for that much-anticipated and dreaded day - Valentine’s Day -  we are celebrating, or commiserating, by dropping a brand new podcast episode that’s all about romance, sparkle, joy, and Jane Austen.

In this episode, romance author Felicity George talks about all of the above, and also her love for the Regency, romance writing, and the long 18th century. 

Enjoy this conversation with author Felicity George. 

Links:

Music from this podcast episode features:

“Friendly Dance” by Nico Staf

“Sunny Traveler” by Nico Staf

“Emotional Mess” by Amy Lynn and the Honey Men

* Visit the website of Felicity George and learn more about the Gentlemen of London series here

Hello friends,

Welcome to a special Austen Connection podcast episode - taped earlier this month, for a live-streamed event at the wonderful Austen Con 2022, an international weekend gathering of scholars, artists, and creators on Jane Austen topics, from Melbourne, Australia.

This was fun!

The annual Austen Con is produced by Sharmini Kumar and 24 Carrot Productions, from Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne and it’s also live-streamed.

It was wonderful to take part in this year’s Austen Con with our friend author Devoney Looser, to talk about her new book Sister Novelists: The trailblazing Porter sisters, who paved the way for Austen and the Brontes.

Watch for more upcoming episodes from the Austen Connection, and more posts connecting Jane Austen to so many, many things - here at the Austen Connection as the season rolls out, we’ll be bearing gifts that will drop in your inbox if you’re a subscriber, and if not why not?! Join our community, here.

Links and more reading

* Here’s where you can find out more about Austen Con 2022 - and special thank-you to Sharmini Kumar and Tech producer Tad Errey for help with this production/podcast episode

* Here’s where you can find Sister Novelists, and here’s where you can follow Devoney Looser and sign up for her newsletter Counterpoise - about strong women, we’re here for it!

* Here’s a biography of Mary Robinson by Janeite author and scholar Paula Byrne

If you enjoyed this podcast, feel free to review it!

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.   

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!

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/

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!

Hello friends,

It’s a new Monday of a new year. Hope yours is fantastic.

And however it is, and wherever you are, here’s some Jane Austen podcasting to power your Monday.

Louis Menand is a New Yorker writer and a Harvard professor who tries to get his Harvard students to read and understand and appreciate the stories of Jane Austen, among other classic authors - that’s his day job. 

He co-teaches and co-founded a year-long freshman Humanities course at Harvard, with author and professor Stephen Greenblatt - the course is called “Humanities 10: An Introductory Humanities Colloquium.” 

Menand says that the conversations in that popular Harvard class - and also the ways we read Jane Austen - are getting more global in scope, and more historical. 

Our perspectives, you might say, are expanding. 

This conversation is the last of our Season 2 series of podcast episodes - you can listen to the entire series on Spotify and Apple,  or play/stream them straight from the Austen Connection website. 

It was a New Yorker article Louis Menand wrote in September 2020 that captured our attention: Titled “How to Misread Jane Austen,” the piece examines current books and thinking about Austen, and how she is interpreted in today’s world. The ideas of Austen scholars like Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, and Tom Keymer, author of Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics, are explored.

Menand is himself the author of several books uniting history, culture, and ideas: His latest is The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

We interrupted Menand’s book tour to see if he’d like to take a break from the Cold War to talk with us about Jane Austen. Lucky for us - he welcomed the diversion.

Menand says Austen is important not just as an early, seminal novelist in English, but also as an innovator. You have to understand Austen to understand groundbreaking experimentalists like James Joyce. 

Like anyone teaching Austen, Menand and his colleagues also have to get creative in the effort to convince their students about the relevancy of the Regency world. Drawing from wedding and marriage announcements in the New York Times and the New York Daily News, professors Menand and Greenblatt get their freshmen students to see that we’re all inhabiting a world of status and class, and money and marriage, that we have to navigate. 

In this conversation, Menand discussed the Courtship Plot and how part of understanding marriage in Austen is understanding math in Austen. That specific Regency-era formula for capital, interest rates, and income is key to decoding the motivations and the stakes influencing Austen’s heroes and heroines.

We also talked about the novel Emma. For Professor Menand, this novel is really about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. As many of you know, I very much agree!

Enjoy this conversation!

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And, thank you for tuning in, friends.

Please let us know any comments or back-talk you have for us on any of the dialogue here - about math, marriage, money, and Austen. And: Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill and Emma.

And, who out there is teaching Jane Austen?

As a journalism professor who has never taught literature, it’d be wonderful to hear how you take on the challenge of making Austen relevant and engaging to students today - whether at the high school, college, or graduate level. Any special tricks? New approaches? General philosophy? Get in touch, teachers. You can simply reply or email us at [email protected] - or comment here: 

Meanwhile, thanks for listening.

Have a wonderful, safe, first week of this hopeful 2022,

Yours truly,

Plain Jane 

Cool links

* Louis Menand’s The Free World

* Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

* Tom Keymer’s Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics

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