Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Lena Yasutake
- Sarah Hurley
- 3 days ago
- 6 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. Our next article in the series features Lena Yasutake, a public educator and theatre-maker passionate about making Jane Austen accessible to people from all walks of life.
At forty-two years old, Lena Ruth Yasutake has spent over half her life as a public educator, working as a full-time high school teacher for twenty years before stepping down to take a role teaching part-time with the Imaginists, the educational branch of New York City’s Holy Theatre. Her work with this non-profit organization affords Lena the opportunity to indulge in two of her greatest passions: public education and the writings of our beloved Jane Austen. When she is not teaching, Lena works as a grocer at Trader Joe’s, enjoying the job’s low-stress, joyful environment.
Born in Virginia, Lena grew up all over the world. Her parents worked as missionaries in several countries throughout Asia before returning to her home state, where they bounced around from city to city until Lena’s teenage years. Around this time, Lena discovered her “gateway drug” into Austen fandom: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, released in movie theaters across America in the summer of 1995. From the moment Lena first encountered the film’s bright costumes, fun “Valley Girl” slang, and spunky modern characters, she was hooked.
When a friend later informed her the film was based on Jane Austen’s Emma, Lena decided to give the novel a try. At over 160,000 words, Emma is Austen’s “thickest tome,” especially beside the much less daunting 80,000-word Persuasion or Northanger Abbey: “mere slip[s] of a thing in comparison,” Lena laughs. With severe dyslexia, Lena struggled to slog through such a long volume of prose. “But [Emma] was worth the work” it took to read it, she says, for the witty prose and storytelling were “so delicious and engrossing,” making her a much stronger and more fluent reader by the end of the novel than she had been at the beginning.
The mid-nineties overall were a fantastic time to be a budding Janeite (especially those with an interest in costume design!). Alongside Clueless, several smash-hit film and television adaptations, including Pride and Prejudice (1995), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Emma (1996), were released in rapid succession. To this day, Lena only owns a DVD player so that she can rewatch her beloved copy of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility at will. “We don’t even own a remote!” her kids often tease.
But while Lena loves the romance and aesthetics of the film adaptations, it is Austen’s poignant attention to human nature that keeps her coming back to the novels again and again. Jane Austen, Lena says, is “queen of capturing the foibles and the silliness and the pettiness and the kindness and the compassion that human beings can embody.” Even “unlikable” characters like Augusta Elton—or Mr. and Mrs. Bennet—are given a full, well-rounded treatment in Austen’s fictional worlds. It is also Austen’s “secret subversiveness,” Lena says, that draws her to Austen’s work, from her subtle commentary on slavery and oppression in Mansfield Park to her broader deconstruction of social structures, class divides, and gender inequities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.
Lena is especially passionate about defending the reputation of Fanny Price, the leading lady of Mansfield Park who is widely considered to be Austen’s least-liked heroine. Fanny is perhaps surprisingly one of Lena’s favorite characters: profoundly compassionate, Fanny “embodies a level of kindness, forbearance, and forgiveness” that Lena herself hopes one day to embody. With such a rich inner life, it is difficult for adaptations to portray Fanny in a “likable way.” Unlike Austen’s more extroverted heroines, who spit off sassy one-liners like “What are men to rocks and mountains?” Fanny doesn’t come across as lively or dynamic on-screen. Still, Lena believes Fanny’s astute clear-sightedness and continued dedication to her moral principles despite her family’s discouragement are traits to be admired.
On a personal level, Lena is very involved with the Austen fan community. She loves meeting others from “the Janehood,” as her friend Damianne Scott would say, at JASNA AGM, as well as regional JASNA events, local events at museums and libraries, and JASP’s annual summer symposium. Like Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood, Lena loves to dance, so she particularly enjoys attending events with Regency balls!
At JASNA's 2021 Chicago AGM, she spoke on understanding adaptations and alternative media forms (such as audiobooks and manga) as “avenues for accessibility” for people with different reading levels, backgrounds, and disabilities. Last month at JASP 2025: Sensibility and Domesticity, Lena delighted attendees with her discussion of costuming choices in various film and television adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (spoiler alert: tassels are important!) as part of the symposium's annual adaptation panel. She also led interactive workshops on Jane Austen’s fashion prowess and Regency letter-writing at the Morgan Museum & Library for Family Day in June. Later this year, Lena will take “Jane Austen Spills the Tea,” a presentation combining Regency tea etiquette and “hot gossip from Austen’s life and letters” originally delivered at King Manor in New York, on the road to Ohio’s Heritage Festival and a New York Capital Region JASNA meeting.
Lena also enjoys participating in Austen fandom in creative capacities. Previously, she owned and operated her own costuming business, Cassandra’s Closet, which specialized in Regency fashions made from upcycled materials donated by friends and community members. Furthermore, after years of directing children’s theatre (including her own stage adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for high school students!), Lena is now an actor. Her first professional role was as Mrs. Bennet in Meanwhile, at Longbourn, an immersive Pride and Prejudice experience hosted annually at the Osborne Homestead Museum and Kellogg Estate gardens in Derby, Connecticut—for which she has been invited back three years and counting! Lena also had the opportunity to show off her acting chops during the JASP 2025 theatricals, where she played Austen’s Elinor Dashwood and Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Adam McCune’s dramatic adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, respectively.
Film stills from Meanwhile, at Longbourn. Featuring Lena Yasutake as Mrs. Bennet, Jeff Rossman as Mr. Bennet, Phoebe Kababian as Mary Bennet, and Laura Rocklyn as Elizabeth Bennet.
Recently, Lena attended a particularly moving local JASNA event at the Morgan Museum & Library, where Juliette Wells led a private tour of the exhibition “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250.” There, Lena met her good friend Renata Dennis, who’d traveled all the way from Georgia to attend. Both arrived in costume, with Lena donning a dress designed by Trenell Mooring. Mooring is a Black American costumer who re-creates Regency silhouettes using African fabrics, imagining what Regency era styles might have looked like if the period were a time of collaboration and creativity rather than colonization.
Their tour of the exhibition concluded with a viewing of Amy Sherald’s painting A single man in possession of a good fortune (2019), borrowed from a private collection conceptualizing Pride and Prejudice's Charles Bingley as a young Black American man. Amy Sherald, a portraitist whose work often depicts people of color in everyday settings, is best known for painting the official portrait of Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in 2018. It was a deeply touching experience, Lena says, to see in Sherald’s A single man the ways in which Jane Austen still informs contemporary American culture, her influence radically inclusive and profound.
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Lena Yasutake, June 12, 2025.
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