Jane Austen’s 250th birthday will be celebrated around the world in December 2025; and who better to lead the big party than Devoney Looser, Regents’ Professor of English at Arizona State University? The marquee event of the occasion is Looser’s new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, out from St. Martin’s Press on September 2, 2025. As the title suggests, Looser’s Austen is anything but the naive, staid spinster of some readers’ imaginations. Instead, we should be prepared to meet an Austen who wields her wit like a scalpel, and who is wise, keenly observant, and still one big step ahead of her readers centuries later. In The Making of Jane Austen (2017), Looser maps out the 19th- and 20th-century building blocks that gave us the Jane Austen familiar to our popular culture. In other books including Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (2022), Looser builds the context for understanding Austen among other women writers of her time.
This interview offers a preview of coming attractions: Here we talk Austen and sexuality, erotica, love, class, moms, dads, and the power of naughtiness. As Looser’s roller-derby avatar “Stone Cold Jane Austen” might put it, Austen herself emerges as one Grand Slam Jammer.
Carolyn Dever (CD): Your Wild for Austen is a wonderful book. How did you end up writing this particular Austen book?
Devoney Looser (DL): I wanted to honor Austen’s 250th birthday. As early as 2017, I was having conversations with other scholars and friends about 2025, the upcoming anniversary of her death … oh my God, now I’m not even getting the dates right. 2017 was the 200th anniversary of her death. 2025 is the 250th birthday anniversary. Getting birth and death confused here, that’s already a bad start.
CD: Trust me, I’m 100% there.
DL: So for a few years I’ve had the milestone of 2025 in mind. I thought people might be eager for more things about Austen. And a next book started to percolate and come together around the concept and word wild.
CD: Have you ever put an e on wild, and thought about her relationship to Oscar?
DL: Have not, but that should be done, shouldn’t it?
CD: It totally should be done. A couple of her deeply satirical works, especially Love and Freindship, just sound like Wilde to me. It’s really uncanny. (Yes, dear reader, it’s freindship!)
I love how your book Wild for Austen is structured with chapters on each of the major and minor works in section 1, and in section 2, chapters on “Fierce Family Ties,” and then in section 3, “Shambolic Afterlives.” Can you situate “Fierce Family Ties” and “Shambolic Afterlives” for us?
DL: So the Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends. That’s how I ended up with a group of chapters connected around the notion of fierce family ties. This structure allowed me to dig into some overlooked Austen family stories—anecdotes we might know only from a couple of sentences in Claire Tomalin’s wonderful biography, or little facts that have come up after the major biographies—that really deserve to be fleshed out. When it came to telling stories about these people around Austen in her family during her life and after her death, I was really committed to trying to tell them in a narrative way that would appeal to all of Austen’s readers, and not just to academics.
CD: You’ve done that!
As I’ve mentioned to you in the past, I teach a course called Austen’s Afterlives. But I greatly prefer your title, “Shambolic Afterlives.”
DL: Because I know you’ve read my Making of Jane Austen book from 2017, you will not be surprised to hear that my heart is in those afterlife chapters. But for the fierce family ties chapters, researching Austen’s allegedly shoplifting aunt was a lot more fun than you might think.
CD: Oh, I envy you that role.
DL: And there’s been plenty written about that aunt, Mrs. Jane Leigh Perrot. Some true crime buffs have thrown themselves into trying to reconstruct every aspect of the case. Again, that should surprise no one. It’s not just Janeites; it’s lots of true crime folks out there, too, using known facts and inferences to try to figure out if or how she did it—or not.
CD: I’ve taught the class on Austen’s afterlives a bunch of times now, and I’ve been struck by the fact that no one’s gone to the erotica. Students do brilliant work on fan fiction, on TikToks, on film, TV, memes, merch. But nobody has done porn; nobody has done erotica. Until you!
DL: That chapter, revised and expanded from a short piece I published in 2017, is going to be loved and hated because the subject itself is loved and hated. But it’s important! And it’s a story that we might imagine started only in the 21st century, but it actually goes back at least to the late 1970s. …
CD: And probably before that.
DL: It is wild—wild in all the ways.
CD: Wild in all the ways. I have been surprised by my students’ reluctance to engage with erotica, because they always come to a strong feeling about Austen’s novels: that they are really about power and about the significance of power as a function of the love narrative, such as it is. What do you think about that?
DL: The students I’ve had contact with seem less interested in the power dynamics and more interested in the Austen-inspired raunchy romance. But a lot of it, if you force yourself to read it, is not really romantic or even all that titillating. It’s shock. It’s shock value. You’re supposed to giggle and gasp when you read the Clandestine Classics versions of Austen’s novels because they are so absurd. But then they often go into full-on smut mode.
A lot of early history of Austen and erotica, or if we’re calling it that—porn—is about a juxtaposition. Austen is imagined as a figure who doesn’t belong with porn. So some Austen-inspired erotica is experimenting with what happens when you put these two supposedly disparate things together. My book chapter describes how, as Austen erotica has evolved since the 1980s, it’s actually become more milquetoast. Recent Austen-inspired erotica is more vanilla than the earliest known stuff.
CD: That’s so interesting.
DL: It’s also disturbing, in that it ranges into criminal sexual behavior. As one reviewer put it, everyone is having sex with everyone. Maybe that shift to more vanilla Austen-inspired erotic content is not strange? I’m sure there are people who could tell us about the history of print erotica or porn who’d say, Oh, that totally squares. I don’t know enough to comment on that part! But it’s interesting that the earlier material is both more appalling and risk-taking.
CD: Fascinating. It sounds like a conference waiting to happen. Sign me up.
I am fascinated by readers’ affective attachments to Austen. Here’s an example. Right before we opened this Zoom, I was at the grocery store and I ran into one of my students and her mom. And this student, who I’ve taught several times, said to her mom, This is my Jane Austen professor, and the mom said, I love Jane Austen. And I thought, There it is. To the best of my recollection, I have never taught a course on Austen where a student hasn’t said on day one that they enrolled because their mom loves Jane Austen.
What does that mean? I don’t get that in other courses, say, on Victorian novels or poetry.
DL: Well, first of all, my response is it’s a beautiful connection over books across generations.
CD: Absolutely. Or sometimes movies, to be honest.
DL: Yes, sometimes the movies. I am all for that, and I wouldn’t want to do anything to try to denude the power of that.
CD: No, me neither. Still, I’m all about increasing the franchise and giving them more authors to love.
DL: I’ve certainly had students say, My mom loves Jane Austen and I don’t love her and I’m here to figure out why. Or My mom made me take this class: which is also really an interesting comment about family dynamics, one that I think Jane Austen herself would find hilarious. My mom made me take this class to try to make me like this author that I don’t like that she likes. But what’s more interesting to me is just this idea of handing down literary knowledge. It’s having conversations about novels that deal, not only with love and romance, but pretty significantly with family conflict—and where the mothers don’t often come off so well!
So it’s really interesting to me when students come into the Austen classroom with that personal history with their mothers. What is it going to be like for us to read the originals together, with the mother/daughter conflicts so central in these novels?
CD: Except for the ones where Austen jettisons the mothers ahead of page one.
DL: Right. But then it’s the mother stand-in who’s often a problem too.
CD: I’m looking at you, Lady Russell.
You’ve made a point about Pride and Prejudice in one chapter that really landed for me. Talking about Lizzy Bennet sharing a disposition with her satirical father, you write, “We’re meant to laugh right along with both of them. But if we do so, it’s because we’re temporarily forgetting that listening in on conversations and rumor mongering aren’t exactly model behaviors. Elizabeth comes close to crossing a line into impropriety here, which she’ll do again and again over the course of the novel.”
This resonated because it put the narrator front and center in our minds; and it did so as you were talking about what Lizzy and Mr. Bennet were doing and what they have in common, and about how they’re naughty around the edges of their expected behaviors. How do you think about Austen’s narrator?
DL: Austen’s narrator was naughty around the edges. Oh yes. I so love that phrase, too; it’s really beautiful. I appreciate that the narrator is slyly, indirectly didactic in ways that are naughty. Right? That is, I’m not going to give you an ending that’s pat. And that’s going against the grain. I like the ways the narrator goes against the grain.
CD: I love the point you made about the end of Persuasion being a cliffhanger.
DL: Thank you for noticing all of these things. One of the hardest things about engaging in Austen criticism is feeling like you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and that most of what you’re trying to say has been said before. Still, you hope you’re putting things together in ways that resonate or bringing in new comparisons that might make the originals look different. I do hope I’ve found some fresh juxtapositions in the book’s literary critical chapters—texts and contexts that maybe you haven’t seen alongside Austen’s fiction before that add a little bit to the two centuries of conversations about her texts and how to read them.
CD: When I teach Pride and Prejudice next, I will ask the students to think about how Mr. Bennet and Lizzy are like the narrator. Because, to me in the classroom, helping students to understand the formidable power of Austen’s narrator—because she is everywhere and nowhere—is the most important task, but it’s also the most difficult.
DL: It can be difficult to teach the concept of free indirect discourse, especially trying to get students to identify why they’re getting sucked in by the narrator when she’s operating inside the character’s head. Austen didn’t invent free indirect discourse, although it’s sometimes wrongly claimed that she did. But when it’s said she “perfected” it? I think that’s closer to the case. This is a moment in the history of the novel where narrative technique and character building move forward by leaps and bounds. Austen also makes it all seem so easy. As you say, it’s tough to get students to step back to examine how they’re being pulled in.
CD: And where they’re getting aligned to, or where they’re getting strategically misdirected. It’s huge fun, but it’s really challenging.
I tried to read Austen for the first time when I was a very earnest 15-year-old. I had been reading Dickens since I was a little kid and had lots of self-confidence as a reader. But I bounced right off of Pride and Prejudice. I just didn’t get it, thought it was boring. And I don’t think I had any equipment for understanding Austen’s narrator.
DL: My mother is the one who put the book in front of me. I was about 13, and it didn’t take the first few times I opened its pages. But, finally, the third time or so, something struck me as funny. Like I got the parts that were comic. And once I could get through the out-of-date language and see the comedy, I was absolutely hooked.
But it was many years later that I learned that, in fact, my mother had never read Pride and Prejudice! It was just a book she thought educated girls should read. My mother didn’t have a college education, but she wanted me to be an educated girl. So I think she was repeatedly putting this book in front of me to try to allow me access to a body of knowledge that she didn’t or couldn’t have access to.
I’m inspired by the idea of Austen being used aspirationally that way. … We think about Austen’s role in boosting aspirational marriages and in chasing after economic security. But my personal history—and this is not an uncommon history—is also about how her fiction might activate an intellectual and educational aspiration, especially for girls and women. So it now means that much more to me, knowing that my mother hadn’t read the novel but somewhere had picked up the idea that it was a book educated girls should read—and that she wanted that for me.
CD: Absolutely. I would link that back to my students’ persistent association of Austen to their mothers’ feelings.
DL: Interestingly, my father is the one who later in life has chosen to read all of Austen’s novels along with me, so that he and I could have conversations about them. So my more recent family Austen story, in contrast to the formative one with my mom, is actually my dad reading his way through Austen for the first time in his 70s and 80s. I treasure our conversations about these books, including his saying things to me like, Don’t tell me what happens next to Lydia. She’s just gone to Brighton, and I know something bad is going to happen.
CD: He nailed that one. I love that.
DL: Yeah, well, his having raised me as a teenager, that was also an interesting moment for us to talk through!
CD: Do you remember the funny thing you identified when you first read Austen?
DL: I really think the thing I first recognized as comic in Pride and Prejudice might have been Kitty’s coughs and Mrs. Bennet’s nerves? It was definitely stuff in an early chapter. The first times I tried to read the novel, as I said, it just did not take. But I’m pretty sure it was finally understanding the comedy of those early chapters and Mr. Bennet’s wisecracks.
CD: What’s Austen’s best comedy to you today? Her best comic moment.
DL: Oh, that’s a hard question. For me, at the moment, it’s Lady Susan. I just can’t get enough of Lady Susan’s manipulations and lies unraveling and her friend’s line, “Facts are such horrid things!” I’m sure my appreciation of that line says a lot about the moment we’re living in. But the way lying Lady Susan is just wrapping people around her finger up until that moment? It’s brilliantly funny.
A big birthday is party coming. You will find your way to celebrate that feels right to you. No right answers. Plenty of wrong answers, but no right answers. Channel more Lizzy and less Lydia.
CD: I love Love and Freindship for its wildly over-the-top excitement at every moment. The swooning and the giving of cash and the departing. And I love that students can recognize it as over the top, instead of thinking that this is British and it’s old so therefore it must be serious.
DL: Right. Like they’re recognizing that the character who discovers his four long-lost grandchildren within five seconds of each other and then, poof, it’s all over, it’s done, and the grandfather just walks away. It’s fantastic.
CD: I teach that story in a survey class we have that goes from the Restoration to 1900 in nine weeks.
DL: Wow.
CD: So let’s just say that Austen chimes like a bell in the context of the hot mess of that class.
DL: Another great line, Carolyn.
CD: Thank you. I’m just full of them today. So I wanted to ask you about Terry Castle and Eve Sedgwick.
DL: Yes.
CD: Queer Austen and masturbating girls and—
DL: Formative, crucial moments in the history of Austen’s legacy.
CD: —and in the history of feminist and queer analyses.
It’s so interesting to me that by claiming Austen for that project, they just crushed their way through certain expectations and barriers, with Austen as their Trojan Horse.
DL: Yes, and in writing Wild for Austen, I went back and read Terry Castle’s LRB essay, headlined “Was Jane Austen Gay?”—which is a headline she did not write—and I reread her later response to the reactions to that 1995 piece. It is so strange that her essay, which was initially misread as Castle’s arguing that Jane had sex of some sort with her sister Cassandra, caused an international sensation. Castle was provoked into writing a response denying that she’d claimed that. It was a time when readers were apparently confounded by the word homosocial or a phrase like unconscious homoerotic dimensions. The outrage at those phrases … It seems like we should be so far beyond that.
CD: And yet …
DL: And yet … Rereading it also did make its arguments feel, in some ways, like ancient history. Just because so much has been said and done since then.
What is interesting to me is that scholars today may like to imagine, Well, queer theory, queer Austen, we discovered it. But some of the things I was able to piece together from historical research show that what’s arguably “queer Austen” goes back to the pop culture of the 1860s. Male actors then performed as what were called “female impersonators” and gave voice to Miss Bates on public stages; and that is arguably queer, even if not progressively so. More deliberate and affirmational queer Austen on stage dates back to the 1930s. I’ve told some of this history briefly before, but I elaborate on it in Wild for Austen.
CD: Absolutely. Austen offers a platform that is often perceived as hyperconventional and really stable. But as your work in this book and elsewhere has so brilliantly demonstrated, that stable platform opens up all kinds of opportunities for thinking and reading differently.
DL: And it’s not new, right? It’s not new. No one invented it in 1991. It wasn’t created at the MLA with a paper Eve Sedgwick gave, as important a moment as that one was. It did give scholars a vocabulary and gave many of us an impetus to go back and look for things in Austen’s fiction to see or re-see. So for that I’m very grateful to Sedgwick, Castle, and others who changed the Austen scholarly and critical space for the better. But it also prompted me to seek out things we’d overlooked in Austen’s legacy in pop culture that were there all along. We just hadn’t put them together.
CD: I know that when you met your spouse, you had an argument about Austen, and I know from this book that the argument was about Mansfield Park.
What I’ve always wondered was, What was the argument? And who won?
DL: Oh, that’s a funny question. You may or may not know, Carolyn, that the journalist Deborah Yaffe wrote about this episode in her book, Among the Janeites.
CD: No, I did not know that.
DL: Her book weaves together stories of what could be called “quirky Janeite weirdoes,” among whom I include myself. And Deborah interviewed me and my husband, George Justice. It was weird that the first time our courtship story was told in print it was told by somebody else. Weird, but fantastic.
Anyway, our Mansfield Park argument came from one of the first questions George asked me when we met: Which was my favorite Austen novel? And I said, Well, I’ve done the most work on Northanger Abbey, and he said, I didn’t ask you what you did the most work on, I asked you which was your favorite.
CD: That’s a pretty good imitation right there.
DL: A very George “taking no prisoners” way. And I said, If I have to name a favorite, it’s Pride and Prejudice, which is still my answer honestly; but he said, That’s not my favorite. My favorite is Mansfield Park. And I said, My least favorite is Mansfield Park because I don’t like the heroine. She’s too much like me. She’s boring. And George later claimed it was at that moment he knew he wanted to marry me.
But I still don’t get it. Did he think he wanted a boring wife? Apparently, he thought someone like Fanny Price was the woman for him.
CD: I have so many layers to peel back there. Maybe he just wanted somebody who would argue with him?
DL: No, he would not take my characterization of Fanny Price at all.
Actually, what Fanny Price and I share mostly is a class background and the ways in which she is exposed and embarrassed and shy. These qualities were part of my self-identification earlier in my life. Thank goodness, I don’t feel timid in the same way I did in my teens and 20s. But George appreciated Fanny’s integrity and quiet power, so there I’ll give George some credit.
CD: That’s wonderful.
DL: I don’t dislike Fanny Price as much as I used to. Maybe it’s because I’ve come to terms with what it means to be from a working-class extended family and a first-generation college student. Academia was a very uncomfortable space for me for a long time. I often felt like an outsider who didn’t belong. Being first gen in this highly status-conscious profession always has had—and probably always will have—lingering discomforts and oddities for me.
But I also now feel more able to embrace academic life. I feel imposter syndrome a lot more rarely. I’m grateful for the perspective that my class background gives me as a critic and a scholar. So maybe that’s why my relationship to Fanny Price has changed, too, as I’ve aged.
That’s another beautiful thing about Austen’s fiction. Your relationship to these characters and books might result in so many layers. Your responses change while your appreciation continues.
CD: Pride and Prejudice is still your number one?
DL: Yes. Professors get this question all the time, right? You get it from your students, you get it from people who hear you teach Austen or write about Austen for a living: They all want to know which novel is your favorite. I suspect most of them don’t really want to hear the obvious answer! They want you to say something clever that they haven’t heard before; and so when you give them the expected reply, oftentimes people look disappointed.
But I’m over that. This is my authentic answer. Pride and Prejudice!
CD: Pride and Prejudice is really, really good.
DL: And I love how I feel reading it. I find new things in its pages every time, as all of us do who reread Austen. There’s always something, there’s some word or phrase to dig into that one hasn’t noticed before.
But the feeling of reading it … It’s what Austen described as “too light & bright & sparkling,” which I don’t think she really meant seriously at all. She probably thought she’d created a just-right amount of light, bright and sparkling, and if so, I agree with her.
CD: George’s favorite is no longer Mansfield Park; am I correct with that?
DL: I’m not going to answer for him.
CD: When you take a BuzzFeed quiz, which protagonist are you?
DL: If you were to take one of those heroine quizzes and get Catherine Morland, nobody would give you a hard time for saying, I want a redo because I don’t like that answer. I certainly like when it comes back Elizabeth Bennet more than when it comes back Catherine Morland.
CD: I have been known to take quizzes over and over and over again, so I do not get Elinor Dashwood. I always get Elinor Dashwood, though I fancy myself a Lizzy Bennet.
DL: Oh, that’s great. There is a similarity to repeatedly taking those old Harry Potter quizzes. I don’t think we do those anymore? That era seems long past.
But I hope that the Austen era—and asking questions about her protagonists as an exercise in values clarification, as a litmus test, or whatever we want to call it—just for fun!—I hope that’s not behind us.
CD: Austen was a helluva novelist. Good job, Jane.
DL: A big birthday is party coming. You will find your way to celebrate that feels right to you. No right answers. Plenty of wrong answers, but no right answers.
CD: Behave responsibly.
DL: Channel more Lizzy and less Lydia. 
Featured image photograph of Devoney Looser © Marilyn Roos.