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Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Harriet Jordan

Writer's picture: Sarah HurleySarah Hurley

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 installment of the Janeite Spotlight series gives a shout-out to Harriet Jordan, a highly accomplished Janeite from Australia.


 

Harriet Jordan
Harriet Jordan

At fifty-nine years old, Harriet Jordan lives in Sydney, Australia, and works on print and digital high school textbooks for an educational publisher. With a bachelor’s degree in English literature, two postgraduate diplomas, and three master’s degrees—not to mention her extensive background in competitive fencing—she certainly falls into the category of “accomplished woman.”


At age fifteen, Harriet was first introduced to Austen’s fiction when she read a comic-strip version of Mansfield Park, and the novel shortly thereafter. “I didn’t actually enjoy it,” she says. “I think mainly because I was very invested in Fanny’s love for Edmund, and [I] was devastated that there was no Big Romantic scene at the end.” When Harriet was seventeen, she was assigned to read Pride and Prejudice for class over her school holidays, “and after ploughing through [D. H. Lawrence’s] Sons and Lovers, [she] found Pride and Prejudice a breath of fresh air!” She read the rest of Austen’s novels later that year.


While at university, Harriet composed her undergraduate honors thesis entitled “‘Like Patience on a Monument’: Jane Austen’s Theme of Self-Command” on the characters of Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot. A few years later, Harriet presented an extract from her project at the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA)—an organization of which she is currently Vice President—and it was later published in Sensibilities, the JASA journal.


In 2019, Harriet began working on a podcast called Reading Jane Austen, inspired by her own enjoyment of podcasts such as First Impressions (also about Jane Austen) and Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, in which the hosts detail a chapter-by-chapter close-reading of each Harry Potter novel in sequential order. “I didn’t intend to actually do this,” Harriet says. “I just enjoyed thinking about how it could be done, and once I had a plan worked out, I felt as if that was that. But then one of the Harry Potter hosts said, ‘I just wanted to talk about Harry Potter, and I didn’t care if nobody listened’. And I thought ‘yes, that’s how I feel!’”


A fencing champ—en garde!
A fencing champ—en garde!

Harriet co-hosts Reading Jane Austen with her mother Ellen, who is a longtime Austen-lover and social historian, and has thus far covered Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma. The latest season, currently ongoing, dives into Persuasion, offering brief chapter summaries, favorite sentences, character profiles, historical context, and pop culture adaptations.


Since starting the podcast, and becoming more involved in the Janeite community, Harriet has become more active in producing Austen-based content. In 2021, she contributed the article “Why Edward Ferrars Fails… But I Still Like Him” to Austen in August. In 2022, she presented a paper entitled “The Mansfield Park Quartette” on Fanny, Edmund, Mary, and Henry at the JASA conference and recorded the video “Wearing a Flannel Waistcoat to a Duel: Why We Don’t See Colonel Brandon as a Romantic Hero” for VirtualJaneCon. And in 2023, she led a breakout session titled “‘Such Different Accounts of You’: Representations of Darcy on Screen” at the JASNA AGM. The written paper was published in Persuasions On-line and a recording of the same presentation delivered at a later date is available to view on YouTube.


Over the years, Harriet has traveled to the United Kingdom several times and visited many Austen-related sites: Chawton, Steventon, Bath, Lyme Regis, and Winchester. On her most recent trip to Austen’s homeland, she revisited Bath and was thrilled to stay in an Airbnb in the lower-ground floor (original kitchen area) of the house in which the Austen family once lived.


When asked to describe what made her fall in love with Jane Austen's work, Harriet says it is hard to put a finger on it. She loves Austen’s plots, characters, and comedy, as well as the writing—the “beautifully balanced and clever sentences, the irony, the way she can convey so much in just a few words.” She also enjoys adaptations of Austen’s works, which—if not always personally enjoyable—encourage her to think about some new aspect of the original novel. Some of her favorites include Pride and Prejudice (1995), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Clueless, Bride and Prejudice, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and From Mansfield With Love.


But Harriet, like so many of us, is still waiting for a perfect adaptation of Persuasion!


Connect with Harriet via Facebook, Instagram, or the Reading Jane Austen website.


Excerpted from email correspondence with Harriet Jordan, April 25, 2024.

 

 

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