I found this book by Ted Scheinman in my mom’s book collection after she died and just recently decided to pick it up.
It’s delightful!
The full title is Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, and it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect.
Scheinman describes growing up with a Jane Austen superfan for his mother, but he disdained the acclaimed author because of sexism.
Fastforward 20 years or so and his mom is scheduled to give a presentation at a Jane Austen event, but can’t make it because she just had knee surgery. Ted has to go in her place, but he doesn’t just deliver her speech.
He literally dresses the part. He dances at the balls. He mingles at dinner. He’s able to discuss Austen’s writing at an academic level, but he doesn’t dismiss the enthusiastic reader who just loves the world and the characters.
He does look down on the academics who talk over the heads of most Janeites instead of making their presentations accessible to the audience.
There’s also a very funny scene in which a woman lectures another woman for her allegedly inappropriate use of Austen’s image. It’s the perfect opening to Scheinman’s chapter about how people tend to relate to different aspects of Austen and her writing. Unfortunately there will always be people who claim their version of Austen as “the one, true Austen” and castigate anyone who says otherwise. Scheinman points out that this kind of snobbishness is exactly what Austen made fun of in so many of her books. That the irony is lost on these people makes the situations they create that much funnier.
I also appreciated that Scheinman understood his assignment as one of the few men attending these events — i.e. dancing as much as possible. With these events dominated by women, there’s always a shortage of men with whom to dance, and women often dance with other women. I’m glad Scheinman recognized this and that he did his best to fulfill his duty (and the fantasy of many a young Janeite of getting to dance with Mr. Darcy.)
What resonated most with me about this book was Scheinman’s description of inheriting his love of Austen from his mom. I, too, was introduced to Austen by my own mom, and we are far from the only people for whom this is true. While most of us are forced to read Dickens and Shakespeare at least once in high school, I was never assigned an Austen novel as homework until I got to college. That means many modern Janeites are not Janeites because of a particular class or teacher, but usually because of a parent or grandparent slipping us a copy of Austen like contraband. Or through one of the film adaptations that come out every few years.
As frustrating as it is that female writers aren’t given the same place in the classroom as lesser male writers, there’s something fitting about Austen’s work getting handed down from one generation to the next. It makes it into a sort of inheritance. And since so many of Austen’s stories are about inheritance, I think the best inheritance she could have passed down to the women of the world is the legacy of her words.
P.S. The date I’m publishing this review just happens to be my mom’s birthday. I swear I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened.