Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Jamilah "Elizabeth" Murry

Sarah Hurley
May 30
3 min read

Welcome back to the Janeite Spotlight series, dear readers! As most of you know by now, the Janeite Spotlight project is dedicated to showcasing and connecting Austen fans around the globe, without whom Jane Austen’s legacy might have disappeared in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This Spotlight highlights Jamilah Murry, BIPOC creator of the multi-platform Jane Austen #Homegirl online fandom community.

Jamilah Murry, or “Elizabeth” as she is known to her Austen-loving friends, is a forty-one-year-old watercolor and acrylic painter, designer, and jewelry artist who loves to garden and grow fruits and vegetables in her yard. She “grew up loving princesses, period dramas, and PBS.” In 2001, Jamilah discovered the novels of Jane Austen in her high school English class, and her fascination only grew after viewing Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005). She bought the prior on DVD and “watched it pretty much every week,” memorizing the dialogue and falling even more deeply in love with Austen’s characters.

As a BIPOC reader, Jamilah is proud to analyze Austen’s books from her own perspective. At a young age, she fell in love with Austen’s prose, poetry, and descriptions of the Regency era that have the power to transport readers into a different world. Austen’s strong female characters resonate with Jamilah for their resilience and refusal to settle for less than they deserve—or to concede to the expectations of others. These characters remind Jamilah of women in her own family, and she honors them both by keeping Austen’s legacy alive.

Jamilah's original #Homegirl Facebook page, begun in 2017.

In 2017, Jamilah created the Homegirls of Ms. Austen Facebook account, a tribute to Jane Austen as well as other historical and period drama fandoms. Finally, her passion for PBS and princesses had an outlet—a personal blog on which to share her artwork, posters and memes, and collages. Once her social media presence began to grow, she recruited friends in France and Brazil to help her manage her pages. Today, her online book club Jane Austen is my #Homegirl boasts nearly 14k members! Jamilah’s Janeite friends live in all corners of the world, from France and Brazil to Australia, the UK, South Africa, Pakistan, Mexico, and Korea.

To advance her knowledge and understanding of Jane Austen’s global legacy, Jamilah completed the University of Southampton’s digital course “Jane Austen: Myth, Reality, and Global Celebrity” on FutureLearn in 2019. Around the same time, prior to the release of Autumne de Wilde’s Emma (2020), Focus Features contacted Jamilah to promote the film across her social media platforms, which she did by raffling off Emma promotional swag. In 2024, she participated in a panel at JASNA’s AGM with former Janeite Spotlight participants Damianne Scott and Sowmya Guntooru.

Although Jamilah resonates with several of Austen’s characters—from Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, who is strong for her family in times of crisis and suffers from a broken heart for eight years, to Emma Woodhouse’s heroine-adjacent friend Harriet Smith—Marianne Dashwood holds a particularly special place in her heart. Jamilah says that unrequited love has been “a common theme” throughout her life. Moreover, Jamilah loves the strong bond Marianne shares with her sister Elinor, which allows her to grow and flourish as she transitions from a “sense-less” and naive girl to a mature young woman.

“I have a very similar relationship with my sister,” Jamilah says. “A relationship that has rewarded me with room not only to grow but to flourish.” When someone whose wisdom outshines your own is willing to guide, love, and support you unconditionally through life’s challenges, it provides the opportunity for you to learn from your mistakes and foster your own inner sense of wisdom. Elinor’s unyielding love and support for Marianne gave her the space to realize that Colonel Brandon, who had loved her all along, would make a much better husband than the more romantic—yet fickle and unfaithful—Mr. Willoughby.

Jamilah imagines herself as a combination of Marianne Dashwood and Anne Elliot—sensibility and maturity in equal measure.

Going forward, Jamilah is excited to see Jane Austen fandom expand to celebrate even more BIPOC readers and writers, welcoming people from all walks of life into its circles. Austen’s witty observations on society and relationships are unmatched, resonating across demographics globally for nearly 200 years now. Jamilah hopes that future generations of Austen fans continue to appreciate Austen’s delightful (and insightful) commentary on social conventions, poverty, inequality, tensions between “old” and “new” money, and women’s precarious socioeconomic status in Regency England.