WITTY, WILD AND WONDERFULLY AUSTEN: A CONVERSATION WITH DEVONEY LOOSER

 

Just when you thought you knew everything about Jane Austen—her novels, her needlework, her famously “quiet” life—along comes a book that turns the tea table upside down. In Wild for Austen, acclaimed scholar (and roller derby alter ego Stone Cold Jane Austen) Devoney Looser invites us to meet a bolder, brasher version of the beloved author—one who was far more entangled with radical politics, wild relatives, and unexpected cultural legacies than many of us ever imagined.

Publishing just in time for Austen’s 250th birthday in 2025, Wild for Austen is a fast-paced, deeply researched, and delightfully irreverent look at the author’s life, her lesser-known writings, and her still-growing impact on literature and popular culture. Whether she’s tracing Austen’s connection to abolitionism, recounting real-life ghost sightings, or unpacking the legal uses of Pride and Prejudice in court, Looser does it with both scholarly rigor and sparkling wit.

I had the pleasure of asking Devoney a few questions about her book, her research adventures, and what she thinks Jane Austen might say if she picked up Wild for Austen herself…

 

Your book promises a “wilder” Jane Austen than the one readers may know. What are some of the biggest myths or misconceptions about Austen you set out to challenge in Wild for Austen?

The idea that Austen’s life and writings were mild, safe, and small is a myth that has had incredible and unfortunate staying power. It’s baked into the legendary stories often told about her, such as that she lived a little, boring life in which nothing happened, she modestly hid her writing, and she knew no other authors. I set out to show that pronouncements of her mildness are not just highly misleading but largely untrue.

My book collects the evidence that shows that Austen’s life and writings had a legitimate wild side, that she came from an extended family full of women writers, and that she belonged to a robust social circle where she rubbed elbows with some fascinating, notorious people. The book’s chapter on Austen’s connection to a Regency-era James Bond and his glamorous opera diva wife may come as a surprise to readers!

From Austen-related ghost sightings to her family’s scandalous stories—your book offers some truly unexpected corners of history. What was the most surprising discovery you made while writing it?

First, I want to be clear that I’m not the only scholar to argue for Austen’s wildness! There’s a long, legitimate history of that, too, as I describe. But what my book is trying to do—through new close readings of all her writings, by telling fun stories, and with new, hard evidence—is show which parts of her writings, life, and legacy rightly deserve to be recast as “wild.”

 

I especially loved discovering new facts and stories about her legacy—that the first time her novels were mentioned in a British court of law was 1825 (in a “breach of promise of marriage” case) or that a famous excerpt from Austen’s Emma was made its way to public stages performed almost exclusively by men in what were called “female impersonators,” starting in the 1860s. I also enjoyed research findings that tell the story of how Judy Garland’s almost starred in a Pride and Prejudice musical in 1947.

You explore Austen’s links to movements like abolition and women’s suffrage. How do these connections reshape our understanding of her as a political thinker?

The myth still circulates that Austen herself was apolitical and that her family was made up of quiet, conservative, country Tories—so she must have been one, too. Both her own politics and those of her immediate family aren’t so straight forward. I see evidence of her being reform-minded on many of the hot-button issues of her day. I also unearthed evidence of the public anti-slavery activism of three Austen brothers (Henry, Charles, and Frank), beginning shortly after Jane’s death. I previously published a few essays about that, the first one in 2021, but I’ve put the whole story together in one chapter of this book. Another chapter looks at her Victorian collateral descendants, who were active on both sides of the women’s suffrage debates, with the most visible being on the anti-suffrage side! I don’t think Jane Austen would have agreed with them, and there were women’s suffrage activists saying so publicly then, too.

What I think these details show us is that Austen’s political thinking, and the political thinking she was surrounded by, was active and robust. So when we find moments in her novels or letters that seem to veer into political territory, we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss them. Austen jokes in a private letter from 1813 that she’s in love with the writer Thomas Clarkson, a famous abolitionist. There’s more reason than ever to  take her at her word here, thanks to these new findings. And there’s surely more to discover.

Many readers think of Austen primarily through her six major novels. What can we learn by paying closer attention to her juvenilia, unfinished works, or lesser-known writings?

Reading Austen’s writings beyond her six full-length novels, especially if you’ve never done so before, is eyebrow raising, to say the least. People who think of Austen as a quiet, inexperienced spinster writing sentimental love stories will have their minds blown. I’m especially fond of the juvenilia, written in her early teens, which features hilarious episodes of drunkenness, theft, adultery, bloody deaths, and even a little light cannibalism! Once you’ve read the juvenilia, I think you’ll see the comedy, irony, satire, and social criticism in the complete novels through different eyes, too.

Austen’s legacy has taken on a life of its own in pop culture. How do you see modern adaptations—whether film, fiction, or even memes—contributing to or distorting who Austen was?

I’m going to pause a moment on the word “distorting” here, because, of course, all biography and all adaptation are, to some degree both contributions to and distortions of their original subjects, right? But I take the spirit of your question, and any discuss of Austen’s place on a continuum from mild to wild would have to talk about both contributions and distortions. I think what I’m most interested in is how the “life of its own” part you mentions prompts debates and in investigating how audiences respond. So I think I’ll just answer this one by saying that I’m absolutely fascinated by Austen in pop culture, although I don’t love all of the film and print adaptations or all of the memes equally!

You write that this book is a tribute to Austen’s “untamed genius.” What moments in her writing strike you as especially bold, radical, or ahead of their time?

All of the juvenilia! And definitely her novella Lady Susan. Lady Susan is all three—bold, radical, and ahead of its time.

You’re known for blending rigorous scholarship with humour and accessibility. How did you balance those tones while writing Wild for Austen?

This is both a question and a compliment, so thank you! In Wild for Austen, I set out to write an accessible book for a wide audience, while drawing on my training and skills as a scholarly researcher. With any luck, what I’ve delivered is the best of both worlds?

I think of it less as a balancing at than as a commitment to reaching a body of readers who might be frustrated by running across specialized terms that sometimes seem needlessly distancing or off-putting. (I do sometimes write for other scholars but mostly in journal articles, not any longer in my books.)

I also think it should be a literary critical crime to write about Austen without occasionally trying to be funny. I hope some of my jokes in the pages of Wild for Austen do land. You can’t always be sure! I’ve tried out some of the comic material before live audiences but not all of it.  

Your own persona—“Stone Cold Jane Austen” on the roller derby track—is delightfully unexpected! How has that alter ego influenced your scholarly approach to Austen?

This is a great question. I think discovering roller derby in my early 40s shifted my perspective as a scholar, especially in terms of learning something entirely new at an age in which many things in my life were “set” and in embracing new kinds of risk-taking. I dedicated the book to the roller derby community who “got me rolling, knocked me down, and lifted me up, not only as Stone Cold Jane Austen but as a stronger and more joyful teacher-scholar.”

I think both the roller derby community and Jane Austen’s most famous heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, share a tendency or an ability to delight in anything ridiculous. I’m not saying literature or roller derby are unserious! I’m saying they’re both chock full of people (and characters) who are incredibly strong, unapologetically smart, and able to laugh at themselves and the world around them when it’s deserved.

If Jane Austen could read Wild for Austen, how do you imagine she’d respond? Wry amusement? Embarrassment? Approval?

Oh dear. Well, I hate the idea of her delighting in my or my book’s ridiculousness, but that’s the price we pay in putting pen to paper in following in her footsteps.

What do you hope readers will walk away with—not just about Jane Austen, but about the value of looking deeper into literary history?

I hope that readers will want to read or reread Jane Austen—and learn more about the Regency era—with a renewed sense of possibility and purpose. I especially hope readers will want do so while embracing Austen’s, and their own, wild side.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels cited in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author or editor of eleven books on women’s writing and Jane Austen. Her most recent work includes Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (2022), supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, as well as The Making of Jane Austen and The Daily Jane Austen. She has also created audio and video lessons on Austen for The Great Courses and Audible. Devoney shares updates and reflections in her free newsletter Counterpoise on Substack.