Hello again, dear readers! This year, we’ve begun a blog series highlighting Austen-lovers around the world—sharing how they first discovered Austen’s fiction, why they love Austen, how they’ve contributed to the Janeite community, you get the picture. Fans, who cultivate and engage in discourse surrounding Austen’s life and fiction, participate in workshops and conventions, host book clubs, and don I ❤️ Darcy merchandise with pride (but hopefully not prejudice—wink, wink), are the reason Jane’s spirit survives in the twenty-first century. We deserve a shout-out! And we deserve the chance to connect with like-minded individuals across the world. This week, we’re celebrating Damianne Scott: professor, scholar, advocate, and founder of Black Girl Loves Jane, a Facebook page dedicated to celebrating diversity within Austen’s work and fandom.
Throughout high school, Damianne Scott was only allowed to read "classic" literature for book reports and other assignments. From the Brontë sisters to George Elliot, to Charles Dickens, and her favorite, the English tragedian Thomas Hardy—Damianne devoured them all. In her senior year, having already read every book on her teacher’s list, she asked if she could read a different novel for her next project, one she’d never encountered. That book was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
“I don’t think you’ll like it,” her teacher said. “You’ve been reading Hardy all year. Austen is too sappy for you.”
Well, reader—Damianne read Pride and Prejudice anyway, and I am pleased to report that it was not indeed “too sappy” for her. In fact, she loved it, claiming that Austen opened her eyes to “a whole new world” of fiction. Things only progressed from there; in college, she took a class on literature and moral imagination that featured Persuasion. In the same year, Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility hit theaters, and BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries reached American audiences on A&E.
In the beginning, Damianne admits, “I liked Austen because of the romance, especially in Persuasion, and in the film adaptations [of Austen’s novels].” The manners, the gloves and hats, the dances and parties, the fantastical notions of courtly, noble love, the smoldering looks tempered by society’s dedication to propriety—she loved it all. Eventually, she began to discover organizations like JASNA, and while she did not join immediately, it was freeing to realize “there were other people out there that were—well, not crazy, basically,” she laughs, “but uniquely involved in this world of Austen.”
Four or five years ago, wanting to create a safe space online to celebrate Austen’s works and other classical novels, Damianne created Black Girl Loves Jane. Black Girl Loves Jane began as a blog in which Damianne could write about different aspects of her life as they related to Austen’s fiction, but it slowly evolved into more of a general platform celebrating Austen and diversity, “especially for BIPOC readers who thought maybe they shouldn’t like this type of writing because of race or ethnicity.”
Today, Damianne posts a lot about adaptations of Austen’s work, especially as they relate to issues of race and inclusion in popular media. For instance, she recently posted quite a bit about Netflix’s controversial film adaptation of Persuasion, as well as Hallmark’s Sense and Sensibility made-for-TV movie, both of which cast people of color in principal roles.
Of the latter, Damianne says, “For the time frame, for the budget, for the fact that it was Hallmark… they really made it believable that people of color lived at that time, which they did,” and not just as servants or enslaved people. “If we can… have balls in 2024 dressed up in cosplay like they did back in 1794, then why can’t we also have a world where people of color are living well and having the same issues that are confronted in [Austen’s] novels?”
Other favorite adaptations include Pride and Protest by Nikki Payne, Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, Camp Jane by Susan Andrews, and The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. Of course, classic films like Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary also make the list, as well as Emma (2006) and Sense and Sensibility (2008). She prefers this version of Austen’s first novel because “it really deals with the dark side of Sense and Sensibility,” emphasizing the seriousness of Willoughby’s actions—and the fact that he gets away with it simply because he’s a man, because he can “marry someone with [fifty] thousand pounds a year” while the poor young girl he compromised and abandoned is left-for-dead without Colonel Brandon’s support.
The “marriage market” as Austen understood it may be a thing of the past, but women in society are still considered “less significant” if they are not married, and especially if they are sexually active outside of marriage. Statistically, income level increases with marriage, and later in life, women who remain unmarried are more likely than men to live in poverty. Stories like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility teach women how to establish themselves in a society that continues to say, “You must be this one thing. You can only have value as this one thing.”
Previously, Damianne’s scholarly work has appeared in Persuasions (“Sanditon and the Pineapple Emoji Craze: Why This Jane Austen Fan Is Offended, and Why You Should Be Too!”) and Retelling Jane Austen: Essays on Recent Adaptations and Derivative Works (“Unwarranted Disapprovals: The Campaign to Stop Diversity and Inclusiveness in Jane Austen Films”), which is to be released this fall. She has also spoken at several regional Jane Austen conferences (including JASP!), hosted a JA&Co. livestream on Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte, and participated in a Virtual Jane Con panel on early 2000s Austen adaptations.
This year, Damianne is planning to attend her first ever JASNA AGM, where she is scheduled to present in a special session, “Do You Dream of Austen in Color? A discussion about inviting POC fully into the Janehood.” She is also currently working on a Persuasion-inspired novel set against the backdrop of an American mega-church, which this author is anticipating with much enthusiasm! Going forward, Damianne can’t wait to see how Austen fandom continues to expand to include more people of real-world diverse backgrounds.
“If you are a fan of Austen,” she says, “be an advocate of people of color, people of the LGBTQ+ community, who want to expand her reach. Don’t gatekeep her. As long as you don’t gatekeep her, we’ll be talking about Austen for another 250 years.”
Connect with Damianne via Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Damianne Scott, April 16, 2024.
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