Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Maizie Ferguson
- Sarah Hurley
- Jun 17
- 4 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. In this special feature, we’re highlighting Maizie Ferguson, nineteen-year-old Jane Austen Summer Program blogger, Jane Austen & Company Tech Director, and Registrar for JASP 2025.
As a rising senior at the University of Kansas, Maizie Ferguson is honoring not one but two of her great passions in life by majoring in English literature with a minor in violin. In class, her reputation as a Janeite, first and foremost, precedes her: on more than one occasion, peers whom she has never met have approached her with the words, “Oh, you’re the girl who likes Jane Austen!”
As far as Maizie is concerned, it’s not a bad reputation to maintain.
Maizie’s love of Jane Austen began when Emma appeared on her homeschool reading list in eighth grade. She was immediately captured by the universality and quality of Austen’s writing: in spite of the “language barriers” that might affect a young reader tackling nineteenth-century prose, “the message and the humanity still got across.”
Maizie enjoyed Emma so much that she quickly progressed to Pride and Prejudice, and then, due to the flexible nature of her homeschooling classes, she designed a semester-long course dedicated solely to the study of Jane Austen’s life and writings. Throughout the duration of this course, she read all of Austen’s novels, dressed up as Jane herself to deliver a “wax museum” speech, and conducted significant research on life in Austen’s Regency England.
“You read her letters and she’s uproarious,” Maizie says when asked what made her fall in love with Austen. “She speaks her mind. She does not hold back at all.” As someone who resonates strongly with the more reserved Elinor Dashwood (fun fact: she even performed the role of Elinor in a 2023 musical production of Sense and Sensibility), Maizie admires this dedication to frankness and candor, especially as delivered with Austen’s trademark elegance and grace.
The start of Maizie’s Austen obsession also coincided with the Covid-19 lockdown, which incidentally marked the beginning of the first Jane Austen & Company YouTube livestream series: “Staying Home with Jane Austen.” Maizie enjoyed the Jane Austen Collaborative’s public humanities approach to teaching Jane Austen, and the series rounded out her at-home course on the author’s work.
Three years later, she attended her first Austen conference—JASP 2023, which focused on Austen’s juvenilia. (As a JASP 2023 speaker, I had the privilege of meeting Maizie at one of the symposium’s social mixers long before either of us joined the JASP blogging team!) She is also one of the two youngest members of the metropolitan Kansas City JASNA regional group, and she has visited Steventon, Chawton Cottage, and Austen’s memorial at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
In February of 2024, JASP extended an invitation to Maizie to author a guest blog series on the Hallmark Channel’s “Loveuary and Jane Austen” television movie series. Delightedly, Maizie accepted the position. Her first article on Paging Mr. Darcy was met with enormous success from our readers, and the following installments in the series were similarly well-received. Since joining the JASP team as a regular blogger, she has written several popular articles for the Austen vs. Brontë series, published chapter-by-chapter analyses for Anne Brontë’s Agnes Gray, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Jane Austen’s juvenilia, and many others, and recently joined Na’dayah Pugh and myself for a Sense and Sensibility vlog series in support of JASP 2025, for which she also serves as Registrar.
Moreover, when Jane Austen’s House at Chawton Cottage posted a call for Austen-lovers around the world to transcribe Frank Austen’s handwritten memoir last year, Maizie jumped at the opportunity to partake in this historically significant archival project. All transcribers were given a single page of this seventy-eight-page document to decipher; Maizie received page thirty-six. Later, the transcriptions were compiled and published in a single volume that is now available to read for free online.
Going forward, Maizie is excited to promote more digital humanities projects—especially Inger Brodey and Sarah Walton’s Jane Austen’s Desk, another off-shoot of the Jane Austen Collaborative—which preserve and make accessible literature of historical significance. As we continue into a technologically advanced age, “it is integral that we use technology to boost such important, enduring, classic fiction—notably Jane Austen’s work, because she’s my favorite,” Maizie adds with a laugh.
For those of you joining us in New Bern this month for JASP 2025: Sensibility and Domesticity, Maizie will be the face of the JASP Help Desk, facilitating registration and fielding attendee questions and concerns throughout the symposium. In July, she will begin a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Jane Austen’s Emma for the Jane Austen Summer Program blog, and she will take over full Technical Director duties with Jane Austen & Company in the fall. Later, she hopes to write her undergraduate Honors thesis on Jane Austen and eventually return to the UK to pursue graduate study.
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Maizie Ferguson, May 27, 2025.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider making a donation to keep all online Jane Austen Collaborative programming free to the public.
Comments