The Racist Anti-White Smearing of Jane Austen

Emerging from the train station in Bath, my wife and I were greeted by the 18th century. There were men in top hats and tails wielding ornate canes; women in elegant regency gowns so large they swallowed six square feet of street; fancy bonnets. It is the 250th birthday year of Jane Austen, who lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806, and the city pulled out all the stops. Austen’s birthday is December 16th, but the celebrations have been going on for months. At least, for some.

Massive banners stretched across roadways; guides in Regency garb greeted visitors at the Jane Austen Centre (a museum I highly recommend); the various Austen residences at 4 Sydney Place, 27 Green Park Buildings, and 25 Gay Street are popular stops. Like the Brontë sisters, Austen died tragically young, at the age of 41. Despite her short life, she left six novels that achieved the status of classics; two, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published posthumously. 

But no English icon can be celebrated in 2025 without a minor chorus of sneering voices joining the decade-long attempt to transition Jane Austen from beloved literary icon to problematic symbol of ‘whiteness,’ which is now a synonym for ‘bad.’ Progressives have attacked the Brontës, Dickens, and indeed virtually every writer in the English canon. But the salvos aimed at Jane Austen are the most ludicrous.

As literature professor Kerry Sinanan whined recently: “The 250th birthday celebrations of Austen’s birth need to be read in the context of recreating a white, nationalist culture for a reactionary Brexit Britain, proud of its military Redcoats and imperial past—reflected in celebratory romance, afternoon tea, naval officers, muslin-gown esthetics and cosplay.” 

The Daily Beast published a 2020 report titled “The Battle over Jane Austen’s Whiteness,” noting that “fans are struggling with the stories’ colonialism and lack of diversity.” To which the obvious response is: Then don’t read Jane Austen. Maybe her stories just aren’t for you. If you want stories about non-white characters, perhaps you might choose a story that wasn’t written and set during a period in which over 99% of England’s population was white.

At Literary Hub, Marcos Gonsalez sniveled in an excruciating article titled “Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen” that the “novels are some big-time white people problems,” which makes sense considering that they are about white people and their problems. Academics have long targeted Austen’s ‘whiteness’ and bemoaned the fact that ‘white people’ like her books, while hoping these attacks will result in purchases of theirs. (One took a different tack and tried to claim Austen for the LGBT movement.)

The relentless smear campaign includes attempts to tie Austen to slavery, which is especially ridiculous considering that her brother was part of the abolitionist movement. 

According to historian Devoney Looser, professor at Arizona State University and author of The Making of Jane Austen, the Reverend Henry Thomas Austen attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London as a delegate. The slave trade had already been abolished in the British empire after two decades of work by William Wilberforce and his colleagues in 1807, with the British navy policing the seas to stop the traffic; slavery itself was abolished in 1833, with a million slaves freed at such massive government expense that the debt was not paid off until 2015. 

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1839, and the 1840 convention was its first major event. Thomas Clarkson was in attendance, as was Lady Bryon and John Greenleaf Whittier. Austen’s name is not on the official list of attendees, and so Looser says she was “stunned” to discover that he was there. George Austen, the family patriarch, had been tied to a West Indian sugar plantation, but “the family’s commitments and actions changed profoundly from known complicity in colonial slavery to previously unnoticed anti-slavery activism.”

Jane Austen references slavery in passing in Mansfield Park and abolitionism in Emma; she noted in one of her letters that she loved the writings of Thomas Clarkson, one of the most prominent abolitionists in the empire. “We know that she read and cared about issues of race and racial injustice,” Looser noted. Her brother Francis Austen also made a notable anti-slavery comment in his diaries.

Henry, a militia officer, clergyman, and banker was Jane’s favorite brother and a major promoter of her work; he married their first cousin Eliza in 1797 after her first husband was killed during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Jane nursed Henry back to health during a dangerous illness, and he was at her side during her own long sickbed in 1817, which eventually led to her death. He was one of only three people listed in her will.

We visited St. Swithin’s Church at the edge of the city. George Austen is buried in the churchyard, and Jane’s parents were married there in 1764; the great abolitionist William Wilberforce wed Barbara Spooner at St. Swithin’s in 1797, 45 days after meeting her. Jane Austen had many overlapping connections with the Wilberforces, who frequented the city throughout their lives. Historians have attempted to determine whether they ever met, and although we cannot know definitively, the great abolitionist and the literary icon were at the same church service at least once.

It was satisfying to see that those celebrating Jane Austen’s birthday have not given an inch to the iconoclasts. The guides were unapologetic fans and the museum contained none of the self-flagellating displays that are so popular these days. The sinister attempts to turn Austen into a symbol of slavery or “whiteness” have failed, but the attempts are notable, nonetheless. Ironically, those complaining that Jane Austen is becoming a nationalist symbol have only their own attacks on her to blame. Reading them, I am reminded of Austen’s words in Northanger Abbey: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”