We're moving from Black History Month to Women's History Month and partying at the intersection
Black history, women's history, Regency history, and some great Jane Austen reads
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Hello friends,
Happy March - spring is on its way in the northern hemisphere and to our many friends in the south, Happy March and happy autumn to you too.
In this post we’re going all intersectional because while we were compiling a fabulous Black History Month reading list, Women’s History Month crept up and we realized we could celebrate both at once and beyond - because every day is a good day to honor and celebrate Black History, and Women’s History, and the History of Us.
And one of the things that got us excited here at the Austen Connection was an amazing post and compilation hosted by the wonderful people at the Jane Austen Summer Program, who dropped this fabulously comprehensive and inspiring reading list. It’s a list that made us appreciate some of the books that we’ve read and talked about with you here at the Austen Connection in posts and on the podcast, and also it’s a list that sent us running to the library to pick up others we hadn’t read yet.
So, with huge appreciation and round of applause for the Jane Austen Summer program (JASP) and its continuous conversations and insights, we’re lifting up and picking up from their inspiration today to show the many amazing Black writers of the Regency and beyond, Austen-adjacent reads and retellings, and contemporary creators lifting up Black lives and stories.
And as it happens many of these reads are by or about women. So: We’re partying at the intersection today, friends.
We’re making this a listicle with comments, but check out Heather King’s full article for the Jane Austen Summer Program for more context and the complete list.
Their compilation begins with the historical category, and it’s a great thing to see all of these books in one place. From Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), to the Letters of Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). King writes that these authors were part of a group known as The Sons of Africa and all of this - including all of these wonderful links - are included in the article for the Jane Austen Summer Program. King also recommends this new book on the life of Sancho, which looks like a great read.
If you’re interested in conversation about Black writers and Black lives from the Georgian and Victorian eras in Britain, our podcast conversation with author Gretchen Gerzina, author of Black England and Britain’s Black Past, was a huge introduction to this topic for us, and Gerzina mentioned in that conversation that Ignatius Sancho is one of her favorite figures from 18th century Black Britain.
And Gerzina’s conversation first introduced us to the work of David Olusoga, whose scholarship and public humanities projects are probably very well known to our British and BBC-listening friends, but are a treat in store for many of us - check out Black and British: A Forgotten History, and also the beautiful BBC documentary Africa and Britain: A Forgotten History, available to view on BBC Select, and featuring a gorgeous score by British-Nigerian “Doctor Who” composer Segun Akinola. Akinola’s suspenseful, moving compositions render the simple acts of reparations, gatherings, and collective stories of this public-humanities documentary-project triumphant. Check out the soundtrack and just see what it does for your Sunday.
American readers may be excited to find the poet Phillis Wheatley on the JASP list - Wheatley published a book of poetry in England in 1773, when New England publishers failed to invest in her work. According to this fascinating conversation with Boston University’s Joseph Rezek as part of the Jane Austen & Co. speakers series, Phillis Wheatley was one of the best-known women globally in the 18th century and was an early published African-American writer. It’s amazing to think that this African-American woman journeyed to England and met with famous abolitionists like Granville Sharp just a few years before Jane Austen was born. It shows that Black lives and activism and ideas were in full circulation in the world that Austen was growing up in, and in which she was writing books like Mansfield Park, where heroine Fanny Price asks her uncle about the slave trade and is met with “dead silence!” - but it’s not really dead silence, is it? Not when we’re still talking about it and exmaining it 209 years later.
The Woman of Colour is another great read under the historical section in the JASP compilation - it’s an anonymous tale dated at 1808, chronicling an adventurous story of a biracial heiress who journeys from her home in Jamaica to England to meet her groom. This is a great read alongside any of Austen’s novels - and a great read on its own, especially for anyone interested in Regency stories.
What is fantastic about this compilation is the mixture of historic reads with contemporary retellings - we’re here for it.
And in the contemporary section, the JASP list includes some of our favorites, and others that had been on our list that we had not grabbed from the library yet (we have now), including:
Marlon James! We were excited to see James on this list, as we were tempted to think we the only ones to notice that James, author of the Dark Star Trilogy, is in some ways influenced by Austen - we happened to hear him on an episode of the BBC Radio 4’s Open Book program talking about his Austen fandom. James also directly tackles the experience of Regency- and colonial-era Jamaican women in his novel The Book of Night Women.
Another Austen Connection favorite that makes the JASP list is Vanessa Riley’s Island Queen, which retells the life of colonial-era Caribbean entrepreneur Dorothy Kirwan Thomas. Vanessa Riley spoke with us about the research and writing of this novel on this episode of the Austen Connection podcast.
A contemporary work that is a completely new one for us is: The Age of Phillis, a novel in verse exploring the life and art of Phillis Wheatley, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. This is one to check out!
Four contemporary retellings that help celebrate Black history and also women’s history also find their way onto the JASP list, including one author who has been on the Austen Connection podcast: Nikki Payne who talked with us on this episode about her novel Pride and Protest, and also Ibi Zoboi’s Pride, Jo Baker’s Longbourn, and Hildie McQueen’s Regency in Color series.
Another thing we loved about the JASP compilation is that it goes well beyond the reading scene, and suggests viewing - hooray for including screen dramas as “texts” - with titles that celebrate and honor Black History Month as well as women’s history, including dramas like the film Belle, based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, an 18th century biracial heiress who lived and was raised on the estate of the influential Lord Mansfield. The film Chevalier and the PBS series Sanditon also get a mention.
Sanditon, based on the fragment of Austen’s very last novel that she was unable to complete before dying, reminds us that Austen actually wrote a Black heiress, the character of Georgiana Lambe, into her last novel - and the PBS writers are attempting to give us the narrative that Austen wasn’t able to finish. It’s a wonderful reminder that not only was Austen surrounded by debates about colonialisim, oppression, liberty, and the slave trade - but she was directly interested in these conversations and was making a dramatic contribution to the dialogue by creating her “precious” heiress, Miss Lambe, perhaps the wealthiest and most intriguing character in all of Austen.
Two additional podcast guests on the Austen Connection who have helped us understand race, the Regency, and Austen retellings are Professor Danielle Christmas, who co-hosted Jane Austen & Co.’s marvelous Race and the Regency discussion series, and Damianne Scott, Austen scholar and educator and convener of the popular Black Girl Loves Jane Facebook group. Enjoy the conversations!
Big applause to Heather King and the Jane Austen Summer Program for this amazing list compiling historic and contemporary Austen-adjacent reads. We’ll continue the engagement with all of these discussions on Black history, women’s history, and how Austen’s stories connect to us today and connect us to each other, here at the Austen Connection.
Also, friends, let us know: Which of these have you read or watched? Or do you teach - many of you do, I know - The Woman of Colour and/or other titles along with Austen titles?
Share what you’re reading, watching and listening to these days - and see more links and cool stuff to check out, below.
Meanwhile, have a wonderful week - we’ll be back soon with more posts, podcasts, and a series exploring Austen and Democracy, which we’ve promised will be not all serious but some fun as we examine Jane Austen’s treatment of power, privilege, disinformation, and division - and in the process how she envisions, always, a better world.
Stay tuned and stay in touch, friends.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
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Cool links and community:
Jane Austen & Co. and the Jane Austen Summer Program host a range of programs and discussions about all things Austen-adjacent - check it all out here.
This entire post is based on JASP’s blog by Heather King and their list of best Austen-adjacent Black History Month reads.
Here’s their talk with Professor Joseph Rezek on Phillis Wheatley.
More readings on Black history and Black lives of historic England:
Gretchen Gerzina’s website and her BBC program on Britain’s Black Past
See: National Trust research into the connection to the slave trade in its great houses, and the report here.
Here’s more conversation on Dido Belle and Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price.
All things Georgian: https://georgianera.wordpress.com/
Peter Fryer’s Staying Power
Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors project
Also:
We are continuing to LOVE the Rosenbach Library’s Austen Mondays, a series hosted by Edward G. Pettit that makes Mondays just so much better. If you want an Austen conversation marathon and have somehow missed this series, you have a lot of fun in store as you can binge the entire thing at the series YouTube channel here.
And the latest Austen Mondays episode featured our podcasting friends from the marvelous Reclaiming Jane podcast, Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. (Shhh: Keep a lookout for some Austen Connection activity later in 2023 with our podcasting friends from Reclaiming Jane and also the wonderful podcast The Thing About Austen.) In the meantime, you have lots of episodes to catch up on!
And, there’s lots of fun stuff on the way, including:
Jane Austen and Regency TV - starting this month, March, each month will bring a new series. Settle in for the ride, and stay tuned here for the watch parties and conversations about these series as they unfold. All of these links have videos and trailers embedded - enjoy!
Sanditon is coming: March 19th - here’s the latest Sanditon trailer!
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/clips/sanditon-s3-official-trailer/Also from PBS - Tom Jones - April 30th - a big Austen connection to this, as author Henry Fielding was one of Austen’s favorite authors.
Queen Charlotte is coming! May 4th: Shonadaland had this info on the new prequel series taking us back in time in the Bridgerton universe.
If you are still looking for more costume drama, here’s Marie Antoinette also on PBS, arriving March 19
Austen Connection friend Sarah Rose Kearns’s latest project - she’s always up to something brilliant and this looks awesome.
For regular conversations like this, join us at the Austen Connection and our posts and disussions will drop right into your inbox!
We're moving from Black History Month to Women's History Month and partying at the intersection
This is incredible! Very resourceful, thank you. I’d love to see more of this. ✨
Plain Jane, thank you for another fascinating blog today (5 March 2023) on the intersection of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. I want to pick up on your comment about Austen’s attitudes toward slavery in Mansfield Park. You mentioned the “dead silence” that greeted Fanny Price’s question (addressed to Sir Thomas) about slavery, and you ask, “But it’s not dead silence is it?” I never appreciated Mansfield Park until I attended my first Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) in 2016, which focused on Mansfield Park. Professor Danielle Christmas taught us about Lord Mansfield and the implications of Austen’s use of his name. I just happened to have finished re-reading Helena Kelly’s 2016 book, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical this past week. Professor Kelly makes a compelling argument in her chapter on Mansfield Park, that the novel is an anti-slavery book from start to finish. She begins by reminding us that Mansfield Park is the only one of Austen’s novels not to be reviewed—Sir Walter Scott did not even mention the novel in his review of Emma, even though he summarizes the plots of Sense and Sensibility and of Pride and Prejudice. The British Critic, with its ties to the Anglican Church, praise Austen’s first two novels for their “sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life.” Yet, the periodical ignores Mansfield Park. The irony is that the novel is disliked by twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers and critics because Fanny is such a moralistic character—especially when contrasted with Mary Crawford. Kelly’s answer to the “dead silence” of the critics toward Mansfield Park is that everything about the novel emphasizes slavery. Sir Thomas’s Antigua plantation is mentioned in the novel’s third chapter; the amorality of the Bertram family is, by implication, due to their ownership and profit from slaves. Fanny’s avowed love of William Cowper’s poetry would resonate with Austen’s readers: his poems are filled with anti-slavery sentiments; he even goes so far as to say, “I had much rather be myself the slave/ and wear the bonds, than fasten them on him” (from The Task). Maria’s allusion to Sterne’s a Sentimental Journey (“‘I can’t get out,’ as the starling said’”) comes from Sterne ‘s novel just before the narrator compares the starling to a slave—a well-known passage in Austen’s time. The Rev. Mr. Norris was also an allusion to slavery most of Austen’s audience could not have failed to recognize. A Mr. Norris is the chief pro-slavery villain of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), which Austen mentions so favorably in her letter to Cassandra on 24 January 1813 (Le Faye 078). As Kelly states, “Once Clarkson’s book had appeared, Norris was a name associated not just with slavery but with the lies and blatant hypocrisy that surrounded it” (170). Austen’s linking of a clergyman (Mr. Norris) with slavery is an indictment of the Church of England’s involvement in slavery. Kelly mentions that “in 2006, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, issued a formal apology for the Church of England’s involvement in slavery” (182). The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) owned a slave plantation on Barbuda (near Antigua); that society was part of the Church of England. It regularly bought new slaves and branded them. Church ownership of slaves was pointed to by pro-slavery advocates as proof that it was not sinful to own another human being. But Austen goes even further in Mansfield Park with a symbol in the chapters leading up to Fanny’s coming-out ball: the chain (a symbol of slavery) and the cross (the symbol of Christianity) are linked in Fanny’s deliberation about how to wear the cross that her brother William gave her. Since Anglican clergy own The British Critic, it should not surprise us that the periodical would not review Mansfield Park, given its overtly anti-slavery allusions. Kelly’s book gives many more examples of Austen’s allusions to slavery; I have only mentioned a few. So, in short, you are absolutely correct, Plain Jane, when you assert, “But it’s not dead silence is it?”