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WORK TITLE: Camp Austen
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE:
CITY: Santa Barbara
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1985; son of Deborah Knuth Klenck.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 2007; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A., 2012; Ph.D., 2016.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Scholar. Pacific Standard magazine, senior editor. Los Angeles Review of Books, contributing editor. Worked previously as a teaching fellow and instructor in journalism at the University of North Carolina, and as an editor at Washington City Paper.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including New York Times, Oxford American, Playboy, Aeon, Paris Review, and Slate.
SIDELIGHTS
Ted Scheinman is a California-based writer and scholar. Born in 1985, he was raised by Deborah Knuth Klenck, a Colgate University professor and Jane Austen scholar. Scheinman received his bachelor’s degree in English and classics from Yale University in 2007. He received a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in English literature.
Scheinman is a senior editor at Pacific Standard and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He worked previously as a teaching fellow and instructor in journalism teaching courses on journalism, satire, and poetry at the University of North Carolina. Scheinman regularly contributes to periodicals. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Oxford American, Playboy, Aeon, Paris Review, Slate and others. Scheinman lives in Santa Barbara.
Scheinman’s first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, tells the story of his experience attending a Jane Austen fan club summer camp. Though the summer camp is the highlight of the book, the story spans the six months following Scheinman’s experiences at the camp, in which he found himself developing a brief obsession with Jane Austen.
Jane Austen Summer Camp is a four-day festival held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The camp is aimed both at academics and super-fans. Attendees of the camp dress as Austen characters, act out plays based on the author’s early works, attend academic talks, and bond with other Janeites, as Jane Austen super-fans call themselves. Scheinman was a graduate student at the University when his advisor approached him, asking if he would help organize the first event in the year of 2013. Additionally, Scheinman’s mother was supposed to attend the camp and help organize it. An injury kept her from attending, so she sent him as her surrogate. Scheinman wrote a small story about his experience, which was published. A book editor noticed the story and contacted Scheinman, asking if he would consider expanding the piece into a book.
Scheinman writes about his transformation at the camp, from critical observer to excited attendee. He starts out the four-day trip making sardonic jabs at the absurdity of fandom, writing from the perspective of an outsider. As the trip progresses, he finds himself warming to the people surrounding him, even connecting with their love of Austen. By the end of the camp, Scheinman is essentially a Janeite himself, embracing his Mr. Darcy character and befriending the other camp-goers. Following the experience at Chapel Hill, Scheinman went on to attend Austen festivals in Minneapolis and Montréal.
The book is just as much about Scheinman’s relationship with the Jane Austen super-fan world as it is about his relationship with his mother, a Jane Austen scholar. Scheinman and his sister, Jane, spent part of their childhood in London, where their mother studied Austen’s work. They would regularly accompany their mother and her students on day trips to Austen-related locations, such as Oxford and Winchester. Scheinman grew up reading Austen, but he never truly connected with the books until graduate school and the summer of the Austen camp.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “witty, sly, and often humorous,” while a contributor to Publishers Reviews reported the book to be “a loving and often humorous tribute to the Janeites of the world.” Amy Shearn in Rumpus website wrote, Camp Austen is “both funny and thoughtful, delving into Jane Austen superfan culture with a wink.” Alexander Moran in Booklist wrote, “Scheinman is a wonderful guide to the world of Austen, and this honest and thoughtful discussion of the role Austen’s works have played in his family will delight any Janeite.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2018, Alexander Moran, review of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, p. 16.
Christian Science Monitor, March 8, 2018, Steve Donoghue, “‘Camp Austen’ is the most delightful Jane Austen book of the season.”
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2017, review of Camp Austen.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of Camp Austen, p. 74.
Ted Scheinman is a writer and scholar based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine. He has taught courses on journalism, satire, and poetry at the University of North Carolina and has written for The New York Times, the Oxford American, Playboy, Slate, and many others. Ted is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan.
Ted Scheinman is a writer based in Santa Barbara and a senior editor at Pacific Standard. He is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his essays and reporting have appeared in Aeon, The Oxford American, the New York Times, and The Paris Review, among others. His first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, is now available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ted Scheinman is a writer and scholar whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Slate, and a variety of other periodicals. He is based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine.
FANDOM AND FAMILY: TALKING WITH TED SCHEINMAN
BY AMY SHEARN
April 13th, 2018
Ted Scheinman never meant to dress as Mr. Darcy and dance the “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot” at a Jane Austen-themed conference. Really.
What happened was, it was his mother’s fault: She is a devoted Jane scholar who raised him in a world steeped with Austen culture. Scheinman was in graduate school, attempting to find his own way, when an injury kept his mother from participating in the first-ever University of North Carolina Jane Austen Summer Camp. She sent him as a surrogate, and he became more involved than he could have foreseen.
The result is a slim volume that is both funny and thoughtful, delving into Jane Austen superfan culture with a wink. As the back matter reads, “Camp Austen is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Austen that can be read in a single sitting.”
Scheinman, an outsider dipping into an insular and passionate fandom, serves as an entertaining tour guide, and throughout the book nudges at the question: what is the overlap between how academics and common readers love literature?
***
The Rumpus: What made you want to write this book?
Ted Scheinman: It’s actually right there in the subtitle—the book really did begin as a sort of accident! One summer in grad school my advisor conscripted me to help organize the first Jane Austen Summer Program (known informally as the ″Jane Austen summer camp″) at the University of North Carolina. I ended up pitching and writing a short reported essay about the camp, after which I figured that was the end of it. But a book editor took notice and gave me a call to ask if I’d be interested in expanding the material. Of course that’s the sort of surprise that writers dream about, so I leapt at the opportunity.
Rumpus: What was your relationship with the writing of Jane Austen before you attended the Jane Austen Summer Camp?
Scheinman: It was a family thing. I had an odd sort of Anglophilic childhood. My sister and I spent parts of our formative years in London, whenever my mother would teach American students abroad, and we’d go to English schools and accompany Mom and her students on various day-trips to Oxford and Winchester and so forth. Mom is all about Austen, both as scholar and as pleasure-reader, and when she was pregnant with me she became convinced that I’d be a girl, and that she’d name me Jane. Upon my birth, Mom discovered quite quickly that I was a boy. Unfazed, she saved the name for my younger sister.
I read Austen’s juvenilia when I was very young, and Mansfield Park at thirteen, and Pride & Prejudice shortly thereafter. But in my childhood Austen was less a set of books and more an ambient spirit. She was Jennifer Ehle in the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice, or the little action figure that my mom kept on her desk. She was a presence, a style. I didn’t really begin to understand the novels properly until I’d reread them all, at the beginning of grad school.
Rumpus: You write that having an assignment to cover that original Jane Austen Summer Camp weekend in North Carolina gave you a sense of direction: “I would chronicle the weekend as a surreptitious participant-observer and gossip collector.” Do you think this made it harder for you to really dig in to your role as the de facto Mr. Darcy? Or did it put you more in the mind of Austen, herself an inveterate participant-observer?
Scheinman: It’s possible that the slight distance required by a participant-reporter actually made it easier for me to inhabit the Darcy role—he’s sort of a master of distance himself, often for good reason but sometimes to a fault. It’s a fair question. I think one thing that helped is that I felt passionately about making sure the camp came off a success, so if there was ever a choice between hiding and working on my notes or helping serve elevenses on Saturday, I would inevitably choose the latter. When I attended later Austen festivals in Minneapolis and Montréal, many of the attendees knew that I was there in a dual capacity, and that consciousness didn’t seem to make them any more guarded around me. It’s funny, this is something people worried about when they hung out with Austen herself: more than one visitor at her family’s table expressed self-consciousness, or suspicion, believing that Austen was scrutinizing them to prepare material for her next book.
Rumpus: Why do you think Jane Austen, of all writers, has inspired such lasting and passionate fandom?
Scheinman: There are a few answers here, none of them satisfying and all of them rather subjective. It’s a commonplace that Austen developed new techniques of psychology in fiction, and in Austen you get the benefits of two quite different styles of English letters: you get the acid wit of Pope and the Augustan satirists, which entered the novel through antic riffs on the mock-heroic such as one finds in Fielding, but you also get the earnest psychological and emotional richness of Samuel Richardson. At the same time, a lot of the interpersonal business in her novels can feel very modern, once you get past the fastidiousness of Regency manners; whenever I’ve been reading Austen, I tend to get a lot of insight into my own friendships (and enmities!). There’s also a very obvious (and more than a bit reactionary) moral nostalgia, or at least an aesthetic nostalgia for a more georgic, pre-industrial period of apparently elevated manners, though most Janeites tend to think of Austen more as a funny critic of manners than as a prescriptivist.
Rumpus: I feel like fandom in general has gotten more culturally significant in the past few decades; my inexpert observation is that it started with Star Trek conventions and has since diversified to the point that there are cosplay-friendly conventions for almost anything you’re in to. Basically I guess I’m asking: do you think there would have been Jane Austen Camp had there never been a Star Trek convention?
Scheinman: I think what you say about fandom intensifying in the past few decades is absolutely true. I also think it has much more to do with the Internet than with Star Trek. Janeites have been networking across state lines and across oceans ever since the 19th century—there are one or two instances of American heiresses writing fan mail to Austen’s descendants and receiving one of Austen’s original letters in return. Austen herself made hay out of this kind of fandom in her letters; she mocks an early suitor, Tom LeFroy, for dressing like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. With the Internet, superfans of anything, whether it’s the Insane Clown Posse or the Grateful Dead or Rick and Morty or Jane Austen, have an easier time creating networks for enthusiasts, so fandom necessarily tends to become less solitary and a bit more collectively frenzied. But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves that this didn’t happen before. Literary clubs are sort of adjacent to theater, and have long involved various kinds of pantomime or dress-up; I’m thinking now of the Kit-Kat Club in the early 18th century, but Austen’s own family dramatized their own fannish obsessions in the family theatricals that they wrote and enacted all the time. Maybe that’s a better answer: family is often the seat of fandom, and fandom itself creates a sort of family, and that holds whether you love high literature or pop TV.
Rumpus: You also write in the book about how these camps and conferences devoted to Austen are largely attended by women “dedicated to a conjuring a period during which few to none of them would have owned property, and many would have been married off to a dullard of a clergyman…” Why do women in particular fetishize this time period, when women’s lives were not particularly enviable?
Scheinman: I don’t wish to speak on behalf of women, but I can tell you what they’ve told me. There’s an attentiveness in these novels to the nature of friendships between women, and while those friendships don’t always pass the Bechdel Test, they’re perceptive, often brilliant, and they mean a lot to a lot of people. Austenworld is also a relatively safe space for women, and it’s a place where they are the majority. As Anne Elliott says in Persuasion:
Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
In Austenworld, the pen is often in the women’s hands, which is why it can feel refreshing and reclamatory. Also, a lot of women in Austenworld are keenly aware of the irony you’ve noted, and they render it partially moot by pointing out that one can enjoy the anachronisms without submitting to their politics. As one woman told me: “It’s like you get the best of then and now! You can dress like Emma but still go to bed with Frank Churchill.”
Rumpus: You allude to the schism between people who love Jane Austen and people who love the Brontës—dare I ask, what is that schism about?
Scheinman: I think it’s natural for fans to become clannish, and it certainly helps stir up solidarity among the in-group—nothing so useful as an external enemy. But I’m also not convinced that one ever has to choose. To oversimplify, it’s a little like the Beatles/Stones flame wars among American teens in the early 1960s. The Beatles were controlled and contained, arranging R&B styles within a sort of hallowed pop chamber. The Stones were dirty (they didn’t even wear ties!) and their music darker—the Dionysians to the mop-top Apollonians from Liverpool. That division of order vs. passion and classicism vs. Romanticism is a powerful organizing principle, and it obtains in the Austen/Brontë schsim. My impression is that a lot of the Janeites prefer the precision of Austen, and are able to find plenty of passion in those novels; it’s just passion of a different sort.
But this is a larger question that pertains to all sorts of fandom. Loving one thing often means disdaining its supposed antithesis, but once you get past that sort of blind dualism, you also start to enjoy things more. So I’m sympathetic to literary tribalism, but I also think fandom should be about enjoyment, not triumphalism.
Rumpus: There is somehow still, even in America’s current #fakenews, book-averse, anti-intellectual moment, a funny kind of tension between the academic and the common reader. Why do you think this tension persists? Aren’t we all kind of on the same side, which is the side of literature?
Scheinman: Well I certainly think we ought to be on the same side, but the very question of what constitutes ″literature″ still involves aggressive dispute. The academy has opened itself admirably, if selectively, to a variety of pop forms, but I do sometimes meet scholars who seem to think that fan-groups like the Janeites somehow give the discipline a bad name. Personally I don’t think they could be more wrong, but the gatekeepers can be dogmatical on this point, and there’s little reasoning with them. I must say it’s ironic that some professors still consider themselves mediators between true literature and some imagined great unwashed mass of readers—Catholic priests in the 16th century experienced a similar sort of frustration. It is a specific kind of snobbery that Austen could have written about with wicked delight.
Rumpus: By the end of the book, it seems like you’ve tired of Janeite culture. Do you think you’ll ever go back?
Scheinman: I’m actually going back to the Austen camp in June. This year’s theme is ″Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein,″ and I’m pleased to say that I’ll basically be the opening act for my mom: I’m doing a talk and short signing one day, with a talk by my mother to follow. Plus she might actually dance this year, in which case I’ll absolutely spin the floor with her.
Rumpus: You work as an editor for Pacific Standard, where you cover some pretty hard-hitting topics, like climate change and social justice. How do you keep from getting depressed about the state of the world?
Scheinman: I struggle with this daily, to be honest, especially with my work on climate stories. I try to take heart from some really amazing and impressive people working on these issues, and to find optimism in watching these people work—whether they’re indigenous activists in Wisconsin or South Dakota or southern Morocco, or surveyors and scientists with good ideas about adapting development plans to account for coastal erosion or disappearing islands. It helps that some of the people I most admire actually work in our office, and they’re a plucky bunch. But I should also admit that more and more I do begin to entertain survivalist fantasies. The current one involves retreating to Colorado, parts of which boast excellent food and water security, with fewer fires and earthquakes than we tend to get in California. Of course that’s a deeply selfish fantasy—though if somehow I came into loads of money I would probably try to start some sort of dreadful artists’ collective where we live off the land in the mountain West and maintain a carbon-negative footprint, &c. I’ll let you know if it works out.
Rumpus: How does working as an editor affect you as a writer, and vice versa? I do both, too, and I find that they inform one another in incredibly useful ways. I often think every editor should write, and every writer should edit, if only as an experiment.
Scheinman: I think it’s helped, though on occasion I’ve also become paralyzed—the writer fearing the editor, and using that fear as excuse for inaction. When I’m in a good flow I can write without editing as I go, which for longer projects is really quite important. I’m a much better and more supportive editor to other people than I am to myself, and that’s the trick, I think: to remember that the editor is a guide and a coach and a supporter, not a censor or a judge, and then to treat oneself accordingly. Writers are often their own enemies to begin with, so a writer-editor thereby has two internal enemies if she’s not careful. All that said, I love few things better than a trustworthy outside editor. It’s a real relief to outsource some of that responsibility, to submit yourself a bit, to say, ″I am in your hands.” Once you’ve got a full manuscript, then you can go back and argue with the outside editor (and with yourself!) about the smaller quibbles. There is something immensely liberating about being edited by someone you trust. Nearly always I love it.
Rumpus: What does your mother, the Janeite responsible for all this, think of the book? And how are her knees?
Scheinman: She likes the book, perhaps more than it deserves, which pleases me—if only one person in the world likes the book, I’m glad it is her. And her knees are much better, though she’s still adjusting to a recent hip replacement, all while leading a gaggle of American college students around London this semester. So she’s a bit of a superhero.
Rumpus: Oh, and this one’s an easy question: what is the best Austen novel?
Scheinman: Emma is the most technically innovative and assured, and Pride & Prejudice is the most perfect, but Persuasion gets me where I live.
***
Author photograph © Lindsay Starck.
Amy Shearn is the author of the novels The Mermaid of Brooklyn and How Far is The Ocean From Here. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, Poets & Writers, The Millions, Electric Literature, Five Chapters, DAME, Oprah.com and elsewhere. She is the assistant director at Sackett Street Writers Workshops, and the assistant editor at JSTOR Daily. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her at amyshearnwrites.com / @amyshearn More from this author →
Senior Editor Ted Scheinman previously served as a teaching fellow and instructor in journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Before that, he was an editor at the Washington City Paper. His reporting on prisons, politics, and pop culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, Playboy, and Slate. He is also a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, appears via Farrar, Straus & Giroux on March 6th, 2018.
An 'Accidental Jane Austen Superfan' on Stepping Into Mr. Darcy's Tights and the Wonder of Austenworld
Stassa Edwards
3/23/18 12:55pmFiled to: BOOKS
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Image: via FSG.
“Some are born Janeites, some achieve Janeism, and some have Janeism thrust upon them,” Ted Scheinman writes in his charming new book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan. For Scheinman, his temporary entry into Austen fandom was a bit of all three, done “half willingly and half accidentally.”
The son of an Austen scholar, Scheinman found himself in Austenworld after circumstances of both money and familial duty conspired against him, a plotline worthy of Austen herself. While a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Scheinman took a job at the university-hosted Jane Austen Summer Camp, a four-day conference where he also finds himself serving as his mother’s surrogate in the world of Janeties—both academics and non-academic superfans alike. His initial entry into Austenworld leads to annual meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America. The Janeites here aren’t mere enthusiasts, but rather almost Trekkie-like in their devotion to Austen and her novels. They dress in Regency clothes, freely quote even the minor works, and gather to “dance and to listen, to admire and to be admired.” But they also come to admire Austen, “to teach, and to be taught; to question their assumptions about Jane, and to confirm them,” Scheinman writes.
THE JANEITES HERE AREN’T MERE ENTHUSIASTS, BUT RATHER ALMOST TREKKIE-LIKE IN THEIR DEVOTION TO AUSTEN AND HER NOVELS.
Since Scheinman finds himself in Austenworld, he does as the Austenites do. In Camp Austen, he recounts dressing as Mr. Darcy in period-appropriate clothing (“I could have been dressing as Darcy or as Prince”). He learns Regency dances and performs the kind of domestic plays that Austen wrote for her family. But despite his immersion, Scheinman finds that he is never truly at home in Austenworld. “The age when such men could be heroes has passed, and even if it hasn’t, such a role is not for me,” he writes.
Though Scheinman’s foray into Austenworld was both temporary and fortuitous, his observations of its residents (overwhelmingly women) are empathetic. There are no caricatures here, only portraits of adoring Janeites, sprinkled with a bit of memoir, history, and literary criticism, rendered with an observational wit that pays homage to Austen herself. “Where else on earth could you see this shit,” a Janeite asks Scheinman. The answer, in the literary world at least, is nowhere else; only Austen and her novels could inspire such devotion.
Camp Austen might not leave you wanting to stitch a Regency dress and go full Austen superfan, but it will leave you searching for an old copy of your favorite Austen novel (In my case, Persuasion).
I spoke to Scheinman about Austenworld, Regency dress, and the particular appeal of Austen herself. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
JEZEBEL: Let’s get this out of the way and note that you are, in fact, a man.
Ted Scheinman: Yes, indeed. I am a man.
When we think of Jane Austen fans the assumption (or, at least the stereotype) is generally a group of adoring women. Can you tell me a bit about how you ended up in Austenworld?
My mother is the first Janeite I ever met. She is a devoted reader of Austen who also teaches Jane Austen at Colgate University, so she’s a scholar and also a fan. I was raised with Austen as a sort of ambient presence but I didn’t read that much Austen. I read the Juvenilia when I was super young and full of violent comedy. It works really well for someone who has been watching Monty Python as a 9-year-old. I never read the serious novels until I was in my teens.
I should also say that I have a sister named Jane. I was actually supposed to be named Jane until I came out and surprised everyone by being a boy. The Austen love runs deep in my family. My mom was supposed to talk at the Jane Austen Summer Camp and, because of a bunch of knee surgeries, she was unable to. In addition to doing graduate work there for the money, I sort of attended as her surrogate. It’s something of an inheritance in the family, but also something that I stumbled back upon after ignoring it for a long time.
INSTEAD OF HAVING TO TRAIPSE ACROSS KENT LOOKING FOR MY SISTER BECAUSE SHE FELL SICK AT SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE, MY DUTY TO MY MOTHER INVOLVED PUTTING ON TIGHTS, GOING TO A BALL, AND TALKING IN QUOTATIONS FROM THESE EARLY 19TH CENTURY NOVELS.
You write about how these inherited duties, which are so central to Austen’s novels, reappear to Austenworld. In many ways, this book is kind of a love letter to your mom. I was wondering what it was like to inherit these duties from your mom?
I think when I was growing up, to the extent that I associated Austen with my mom, it was maybe in a simplistic way, a sort of refinement and elegance, a style more than a particular setting in geography or time. Austen wasn’t necessarily of the Regency when I was growing up, rather she was this sly and perceptive style. I really only knew her through my mom reading the books aloud and watching all of the adaptations.
I will say that it was very gratifying to find myself in this scenario that seemed to reflect this parody or funhouse version of the inherited duties in the novels where, instead of having to traipse across Kent looking for my sister because she fell sick at someone else’s house, my duty to my mother involved putting on tights, going to a ball, and talking in quotations from these early 19th century novels.
You brought up putting on tights, so let’s dwell there for a moment. What was it like to transform into character, in this case, Mr. Darcy? Clothes make the man, but what does that mean in Austenworld?
I should say that when they chose me to be Mr. Darcy, I was the only guy. They weren’t pulling from a huge pile so it was more a distinction of necessity, not that I actually look like Colin Firth. So, there’s that.
It was very fun. I will say that with the exception of a couple of moments when I got conceptually confused by the notion of tights, it didn’t really otherwise feel emasculating at all. When you put on those clothes, especially since they’re really fitted to your body (I was fortunate enough to have wonderful friends in the theater department at University North Carolina who lent me costumes for free and fit them and everything) you have to have really good posture since the shoulders can be quite tight. Obviously, men aren’t wearing a corset, a lot of women aren’t either, but there’s sort of rectitude to the posture, which is really fitting if you’re supposed to be playing this patrician hero. To that extent, what you said about clothes making the man, is sort of true.
There’s this quote, a Goethe quote about how to speak another language is to have a second soul, and as goofy as it sounds, I think there is something to that. When you’re dressing up in these very stylish costumes along with other people, and all of these people are quoting Regency dialogue at you in this wonderful imitation of the formalism of Austen dialogue, you really do start to become a bit more proper—more likely to offer to get a woman or refreshing glass of water, or step out about put yourself forward and step out on the dance floor, because you’re essentially dressed in the skin of this other period.
You write about the “absurd exoticism” of being one of the few men the room or describe promotion to Mr. Darcy (if that’s a promotion, I’m not really sure) as “affirmative action.” I was wondering as I read this book—and maybe you have some insight: Why is Austenworld overwhelmingly women? You briefly explore this history of men reading Austen during World War I and the history of editing her books. There hasn’t always been this perception that Austen is for women...
Absolutely. Austen’s earliest champions were mostly men. As she says in Persuasion, “the pen has been in [men’s] hands,” so her earliest champions were of course men, but you have Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, and E.M. Forster, and all of the rest. As Virginia Woolf said, “there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon [Austen’s] genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.” For a long time, Janeism was a place not necessarily dominated by men but it was thick with men. I think there are a number of reasons that nowadays, it’s less so.
MY MOTHER IS THE FIRST JANEITE I EVER MET.
First of all, at the Austen Summer Camp or at the big annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, I think the dress up does tend to offend or endanger a certain kind of highly protected masculine dignity. You do have to put yourself out there and wear clothes that, in this century, might be associated with women. I also think—though I don’t have hard numbers—women read more novels than men. There’s a lot to recommend Austen to any reader, but I do think that she has a style of dramatizing friendship between women that has proven enduringly special.
I also suspect that if you look at a lot of those male enthusiasts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were enjoying different aspects of her work from the ones we celebrate today. Scott, for example, when he wrote his big celebration of Emma, focused a lot on technique. It was essentially as if he were mining her novels for tools that he could use or steal. It feels a little bit like that’s what he’s doing. He doesn’t get quite so much into the psychology of the novels, though he does briefly touch on it. Now, we talk about psychology as an area in which Austen was, of course, a pioneer. Robert Chapman is the same way—it’s not a bad thing—he’s very perceptive about her technique, and it’s really fantastic.
Occasionally it does feel as though in their scholarly writings or commentaries that these men are somehow trying to implicitly justify Austen among a pantheon of “Serious” English writers, as opposed to say a no less valuable enjoyment of recognizable realism or relatability. I don’t want to be super essential and imply that men read Austen one way and women read her in another way, but the public profile of the male Austen scholar I think was quite different from what you see among civilian enthusiasts nowadays, whether they’re men or women.
Definitely, Forster has this real appreciation for her technical acumen…
Absolutely, and he mined that really well. Howards End owes almost everything to Sense and Sensibility.
That brings me to a broader point that you make in the book, namely that there is a multitude of Jane Austens. There’s this technically accomplished Jane celebrated by these men, but for the women of Austenworld, she can be many things. I read your book thinking that this flexibility that allows for her to inhabit multiple identities depending on the reader seems really particular to Austen. Why is it Austen and not, say, a Bronte sister?
This is an enduring question. I don’t have a complete answer, but I think there are a few things. One of them is the sort of perfect degree of negative space left around her biography. We know a whole lot about how she spoke to her family, we have a great sense of how she wrote to them because we have a bunch of her letters, but we don’t have most of them. We’ve been told specifically that the most interesting letters were all burned. We can take that with a grain of salt, but there’s a lot of space around what we know about her and a lot of questions.
One example of choosing your Jane or the imaginative work that goes into trying to figure out who Austen was in the absence of a full account is looking at her suitors. Austen had a number of suitors throughout her life, but we actually know quite little about any of them. We know a bit about Tom Lefroy, who she flirted with a whole lot; she writes about him in the letters well before he becomes Chief Justice of Ireland. There’s famously Harris Bigg-Wither, this man with a ridiculous last name—he sounds like a vacuum cleaner—and she accepted a marriage proposal from him only to rescind it the next day. There’s also an allusion to a seaside romance.
There are holes in any author’s biography, particularly any author’s erotic biography, but there’s a special number of holes in Austen. I also think that the marriage plots, the fairy tale brought down to earth, of the novels make us want to believe that this is a woman who is really wise in the ways of love. You meet people at these conferences and each of them has a very persuasive, lively, and interesting take on what their best estimate is of Jane Austen’s amorous biography.
This is all so subjective, but there’s this fairy tale trick that Austen does in the novels. In the fairy tale, the princess kisses the frog and he is revealed to be a prince and, I think in many of Austen’s book, you see a similar clarification or adjustment where, through the magic of her narration, an apparent frog reveals themselves as princes, and princes reveal themselves as the worst sort of frog. I think there’s an impulse to find the fairy tale in Austen’s own life; failing that, to imagine one for her.
So you have a lot of revisionist biographies, you have a lot of fan fiction about Austen herself, and you have all of these interesting remixes. There’s the YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, which is maybe the high water mark. I wouldn’t say that there’s an infinite elasticity to Austen, but there’s a capaciousness there. Her world is so rich, but she leaves us so much room to fill in the margins around it. I think it offers a lot to the imagination and it’s really appealing. That’s the reason we have so many Austens.
I THINK THERE’S AN IMPULSE TO FIND THE FAIRY TALE IN AUSTEN’S OWN LIFE; FAILING THAT, TO IMAGINE ONE FOR HER.
To return for a moment to the novels, I was wondering if you think the novels themselves lend themselves to this particular fandom, especially the dress up? To play a character in an Austen novel seems maybe easier to do in some sense since even the most villainous character in an Austen novel isn’t that bad—or, at least not this monstrous character from Gothic fiction. To give you an example, I love Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, but the idea of dressing up as one of the characters from that book seems psychotic. I can’t imagine that there are a lot of people who want to dress up as Lucy Snowe.
Do you think it’s the novels paired with Austen that makes this kind of enthusiasm more pleasurable or perhaps less conflicted? Dressing up like as George Wickham from Pride and Prejudice seems a lot more acceptable than, say, dressing up like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.
I bet you could find plenty of people!
But what you’re saying is a really important point, that it is less morally compromised to dress up as an Austen character. No one is, as you say, truly terrible but there are some villains in there. They’re not murderers, they’re womanizers and they’re secret ones who are not conspicuously brooding. I also think that’s part of the identification that these particular fans have with Austen. You’re probably not going to run into a madwoman in the attic in your daily life or a set of twins or you’re not going to get locked in some Spanish castle. You will probably be secretly disappointed by the person your best friend chooses to marry, or you will see your neighbors disgraced and you’ll have to figure out how to be a good neighbor without partaking in their disgrace.
Maybe this is just me, but I do think that whenever I’ve been reading Austen for awhile, I come back with a much more Austenian-like way of thinking about my friends and my duties to them. In a way that sounds conservative, but maybe that’s why it’s appealing to dress as these characters. However far down the scale you go, at no point are you ever going to become a monster.
You spent a lot of time in Austenworld, and you present the idea of an endless number of Janes, arguing that this democratic engagement from academic to superfan brings you closer to the real thing. But you never really say what for you is the most authentic version of Jane Austen. So I wonder, what is the real Jane for you?
That’s such a difficult question. I tend to be cautious which means that I accept portions of most accounts.
When one writer wrote a book called Jane Austen: Secret Radical, I can appreciate very much where she is coming from. I tend not think that any single phase of Austen’s life defined her. There are people who really latch onto a very serious turn toward English evangelism in the last years of her life. There are other people who read her Juvenilia and look at how aggressively she wrote against Elizabeth I and extrapolate a whole lot of politics out of that. There are people who have made the persuasive argument that she was much more globally involved than you would think, given how provincially her life seems to have been described.
I think all of it is true, and I’m also skeptical of any account that takes them too far. I agree that she read a lot of newspapers and had brothers in the Navy and wrote to them all of the time. I do think she had a consciousness of the East and West Indies that was pretty sophisticated. I also think that she was really speaking the truth when she said that she couldn’t write an epic or a war novel.
AUSTEN WAS ESSENTIALLY A DEPENDENT HER ENTIRE LIFE, EVEN AFTER SHE MADE A LITTLE BIT OF MONEY FROM HER NOVELS.
I think of Austen as a virtuoso of her own limitations—geographically and financially. She was essentially a dependent her entire life, even after she made a little bit of money from her novels. But she made it work. I suppose I do think of her as a bit of revolutionary if only because it was a bit radical to shape your life that way and to be bold enough to say, especially from her position, I want to be an author. But I will say that Austen was about the acceptable administration of hierarchies, so if you really want to call her a radical, you have a bit of a steep hill to climb.
But certainly, I’ll join with Forster and insist that she was not a “spinster in a backwater,” which is his line, but she was a great artist.
You spend some time in Austenworld, but you’re never completely converted. Why didn’t you transform into a superfan writing fanfiction?
I don’t think it’s because I don’t love the novels enough, I really do love them. I think it requires an extraordinary personal identification with the author and the material and I’m reasonably obsessed, but it’s not the sort of thing I would have done in the first place if circumstances hadn’t conspired to put me into those tights. To me, it remains an affectation. But for other people, as silly as this sounds, it’s the most natural thing in the world. That’s not to say that there’s one kind of Janeite that’s perfectly attuned to the clothes. It’s a whole big tent. There were moments too at the last couple of balls where I looked around and everyone was having a lovely time and I thought, “I’m a bit superfluous here and just a tiny bit bored.”
That’s a frank answer, if maybe an incomplete one. My preferred version is to engage with the novels in a kind of solitary way. I don’t think that will ever get old or tired.
After all of this talk about Austen, I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: What’s your favorite Jane Austen novel?
I think it has to be Persuasion. I will say that there are days that Pride and Prejudice actually jockeys up there, and I have a soft spot for Sense and Sensibility. Nonetheless, my desert island one is going to be Persuasion.
‘Camp Austen’: Author Ted Scheinman looks back at his time with the Jane Austen Summer Program
March 6, 2018
UNC graduate students, from left, Adam McCune, Ashley King and Ted Scheinman at JASP 2014.
If you attended the early years of the Jane Austen Summer Program, you probably recognize Ted Scheinman, who was a graduate student and played, ahem, Mr. Darcy at our first-ever Jane Austen Summer Program. If you don’t know him, you can read about his JASP experience and more in his book, “Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan,” which is out today!
Scheinman is a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine in California. His work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Paris Review, Slate, the Atlantic and Playboy. Before he studied at UNC, he was an editor at Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C. He grew up spending a lot of time in the United Kingdom, where his mother, JASP attendee Deborah Knuth Klenck, led study-abroad groups. “Mom, as you know, is a Janeite herself, which is probably how I got mixed up in this whole beautiful world to begin with,” Scheinman says.
We chatted with him about his book and his time with JASP.
The Austen fandom from the male perspective isn’t something we read about very often. What made you decide to write a book on your JASP experience? Did you know before or after that you’d be writing about it?
The book was a bit of a surprise to me too, frankly! A day before we began the inaugural JASP in 2013, I told James that I’d be writing a short essay about it for the Paris Review. So I took lots of notes and did a few interviews with various Janeites, but my main focus that first weekend was making sure everything went smoothly from a logistical perspective; and of course we had the theatricals to worry about. On the last day of the first JASP, I wrote the essay and thought that would be the end of it. But the piece attracted quite a few readers … and a couple of days after it ran, an editor at Faber called me up to suggest that I write a short book about the experience. A few things made that process slow — my first editor left the country for another job, the book was moved to a different imprint at Macmillan, I took a semester to do my written and oral PhD exams and to write and defend my prospectus, then I moved across the country to take a full-time job in journalism — but eventually I wrote the book, and when I did so I tried my best to honor the Janeites while unlocking their mysteries. The book is emphatically not about making fun of Janeites. After all, I am one.
Did you have any preconceptions about Austen fans before you “became” Mr. Darcy that you changed your mind about after the fact or while you were writing?
This is a great question. I probably harbored at least a few of the preconceptions about Janeism common among men, even (or perhaps especially) among a certain sort of male scholar. I think I suspected there would be lots of Mrs. Bennets — dotty or absent-minded enthusiasts. To say that I was impressed by the attendees at the first JASP would be an understatement. I admired the hell out of them and found myself quickly intoxicated. There were very few Mrs. Bennets (though at later JASNA meetings I did meet a Mr. Collins or two). Very quickly it became clear that, to be worthy of the company, I should aspire to the light touch of Henry Tilney and avoid entirely the boorishness of a John Thorpe, or even the aloofness of a Darcy.
What’s your favorite JASP memory?
Absolutely the theatricals adapted and performed by the grad students. Those were endless fun both years I participated (2013 and 2014). It was a brilliant suggestion when James and Inger told us to adapt portions of the juvenilia — some of the funniest scenes that Austen ever wrote.
What are you most looking forward to when you return in June?
Scheinman during the 2014 theatrical.
I haven’t seen most of my old friends and colleagues in Chapel Hill since 2016, so I’m looking forward to everything and everyone. My mother will also be present. … I’ve already pledged two dances to her. That will be a highlight.
Are you nervous about reader reactions?
I am. Reporting on any subculture is a delicate task — you want to preserve what’s good and true and intoxicating within a sort of secret society, and also what’s funny and odd. If I can do that without the subjects feeling mocked or misrepresented, then I feel good.
Last question: What’s the most uncomfortable part of men’s Regency costume?
I still struggle with the tights.
Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan
Alexander Moran
Booklist. 114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan.
By Ted Scheinman.
Mar. 2018.176p. Farrar, paper, $14 (9780865478213). 823.7.
A treat for any Jane Austen fan, this book is ostensibly Scheinman's account of his role in the development of the Jane Austen Summer Camp, a four-day festival held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 that intentionally fuzzed the lines between academia and fandom. In actuality, this is about his relationship with his mother, a not ed Austen scholar and his gateway to Janeism. Scheinman details the events of the summer camp, where attendees dressed as characters, acted out plays based on Austen's early work, attended academic talks, and generally reveled in the joy of being surrounded by other devoted Janeites. While Scheinman is clearly an astute reader of Austen--he includes numerous analyses of Austen's life and work that are insightful and often quite funny--this is also a fascinating window into a man's experience in a largely female realm. Scheinman is a wonderful guide to the world of Austen, and this honest and thoughtful discussion of the role Austen's works have played in his family will delight any Janeite.--Alexander Moran
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Moran, Alexander. "Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171497/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7b602dcc. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171497
Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan
Ted Scheinman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-86547-821-3
In this lively debut, Scheinman expertly captures the most memorable moments from the year and a half that he spent "in the world of Jane Austen fandom." The son of an Austen scholar, Scheinman "half willingly and half accidentally" found work at a four-day conference called Jane Austen Summer Camp, where he learned the rules of a worldwide "secret society" of Jane Austen fans--known simply as Janeites--whose enthusiasm for novels such Pride and Prejudice is "passionate to the point of obsession." He describes meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America, where "hundreds of superfans congregate to dispute interpretations, share recipes ... and argue with the finest scholars in the world." Constantly taking notes "like an embedded reporter," Scheinman observed the "thrilling and disarming" fellowship shared by scholars and laypeople and realized that Austen is "the rare sort of author who makes possible this unaccustomed exchange between academics and civilians." This is a loving and often humorous tribute to the Janeites of the world. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839821/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c53df95. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839821
Scheinman, Ted: CAMP AUSTEN
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Scheinman, Ted CAMP AUSTEN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $14.00 3, 6 ISBN: 978-0-86547-821-3
A light and frothy tour of Austenworld and its Janeites.
"I didn't last in Austenworld," writes Pacific Standard senior editor Scheinman, "but for a time it was ludicrous, intoxicating, and sometimes heartbreaking." If his mother hadn't been a noted Austen scholar, he "might never have found [his] way in." When young, he started with Austen's juvenile notebooks, Austen's own "record of fandom," filled with "perverse celebrations of her literary enthusiasms." In his witty, sly, and often humorous first book, Scheinman discusses his time as a graduate student when one of his graduate professors decided to hold the first-ever Jane Austen Summer Camp. "American enthusiasm for Austen is (as I would soon learn) passionate to the point of obsession," he writes. At first, it "sounded dreamlike, a little unreal." He notes that in the late 19th century, scholar and critic George Saintsbury coined the term "Janeite" for those devoted to her work, and the great novelist E.M. Forster was "one of the more conspicuous Janeites of his age." To Scheinman, the gathering reminded him of a "religious diaspora, a far-flung church, whose functionaries convene in heterodox worship." Let the tour begin. First, the costumes: "Dressing as Mr. Darcy at an Austen symposium is like playing Mickey Mouse at Disney World." Then the panels, where "representatives of the academy" would mingle with "their civilian counterparts." Followed by a little table talk at meal times: "they offer the most gossipy and delicious interactions." Next, the theatricals, plays about Austen and her characters written and performed (in costume) by participants as well as screenings of films about Austen's books. Last but not least, there's the Ball. After all, Henry, Austen's favorite brother, wrote that Jane "enjoyed dancing, and excelled at it." Scheinman picks and pokes a little here and there, but he admits it's "some of the best and cleanest fun available to an academic."
A pleasing divertissement for Austen fans everywhere.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Scheinman, Ted: CAMP AUSTEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491320/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=31498500. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518491320
'Camp Austen' is the most delightful Jane Austen book of the season
Steve Donoghue
The Christian Science Monitor. (Mar. 8, 2018): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Steve Donoghue
Casual readers who may have enjoyed Pride and Prejudice when they read it at school and who vaguely remember the old BBC adaptation starring a sultry Colin Firth will have not the faintest conception of the size and sheer fanaticism of Jane Austen fandom that has existed for two centuries and currently spans the globe like a well-mannered and exceedingly well-dressed secret society.
Members of this fandom cosplay with compulsive regularity; they can quote random letters or snatches of the Juvenilia with the casual command baseball addicts reserve for Bill James; they hold their author above the ranks of other mere scribblers. As Virginia Woolf famously remarked almost a century ago, "There are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts."
Ted Scheinman, senior editor of Pacific Standard magazine and scion of a passionately Janeite family,inadvertently ventured into the world of this fandom when he helped to organize the inaugural meetings of the Jane Austen Summer Camp as a grad student at the University of North Carolina - a summer camp where there would be talks and conferences, but also dancing, amateur theatricals, and lavish Regency costumes. Right from the start, our young author is aware of the fantastic nature of the undertaking: "It managed to suggest Jane Austen at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills or the Great Lakes, winning the archery competition, fiddling with the reverse-osmosis water filter, and refusing to participate in kickball."
His report takes the form of the most delightful Jane Austen book of the season, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan. "Some are born Janeites," Scheinman muses, "some achieve Janeism, and some have Janeism thrust upon them" - and he sees his own experience as a combination of all three.
He was raised in a bookish, Austen-loving home, he's genuinely curious about superfandom, and that superfandom gives him preferred status (he sarcastically refers to it as affirmative action) due to a factor beyond his control - he's male in an intensely female world: "A young man who cleans up nice and can recite Austen when properly motivated, I met certain minimal requirements and was thereby elevated to a sort of absurd exoticism."
His exploration of that world may have started out with the sardonic remove of a David Sedaris, but it quickly warms to a kind of "embedded" Jane Goodall-style anthropology in which the observer comes to identify so closely with the observed that the distinctions lose their meaning. "Camp Austen" is a sharp and wholly affectionate portrait of author-fandom raised to a manic pitch.
Participants in the Jane Austen Summer Camp come for all kinds of reasons, as Scheinman notes: "They come to laugh and to learn, to dance and to listen, to admire and to be admired; to teach, and to be taught; to question their assumptions about Jane, and to confirm them."
But throughout "Camp Austen," Scheinman pleasingly never loses sight of the literature that's at the heart of all this over-eager fun. "Our fashioning of Austen always seems to involve higher stakes, or at least a more passionate audience, than it does with other authors." As a teacher once told him, you don't see bumper stickers that say "I'd rather be reading Tolstoy."
Scheinman savors the "fortified" punch at these galas. He sports his most convincing Mr. Darcy costume. He listens to the visiting professors lured by the promise of good food (clotted cream!). He receives apropos quotes and makes them in return. He participates in all the Regency-era entertainments. He dances. All the Janeites love to dance. This is the closest thing most readers will likely want to come to such period-fidelity zealotry, but it's all the more fun for that.
Eventually, Scheinman begins to worry he's a bit of a fraud, someone who's given a pass because he fills out a pair of breeches. "The Janeites' love of the author, their expert and honestly gained knowledge of her age and its manners, their delights in dances that bored me after an hour or so - these all came to feel like an accusation, an indictment of my own dilettantism."
But his tone throughout the book is anything but melancholy; his depiction of "Austenworld" glows with affection and insight, and his asides about the Austen canon itself are uniformly thought-provoking. "Camp Austen" may not prompt most readers to don their best topcoats and taffeta, but it will certainly send them hurrying back to the novels, to savor again what Scheinman refers to as a world displaced in time.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donoghue, Steve. "'Camp Austen' is the most delightful Jane Austen book of the season." Christian Science Monitor, 8 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530342089/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=00b1c064. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530342089