Anisa Khalifa: I am standing in front of a country house, built in the style of English aristocrats, surrounded by ladies wearing long gowns and bonnets, but I haven't traveled back in time to Regency England. For one thing, the sun is blazing down and it's hot. Way too hot for Britain. There's a barbecue restaurant down the road and a double tree by Hilton.
One block over. I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
This is the Jane Austen summer program in North Carolina.
Samiha Bala: Jane writes exactly what she knows, and that is why she is a genius.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, we follow a group of Jane Austen super fans who gather annually to celebrate her life and work. And find out why this literary icon is still so relevant 250 years after her birth.
Mr Darcy: Or a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in one of awake.
Anisa Khalifa: Yes, he must indeed. Okay. So that line from Pride and Prejudice may not in 2025 be a universal truth, but it's a quote that's launched a thousand adaptations. Just look at all the retellings we've gotten in the last few decades. A lot of them set in the modern world.
Everything from Clueless, oh, as if.
Anisa Khalifa: To Bridget Jones'. Diary
Mr Darcy: perhaps despite appearances, I like you
Anisa Khalifa: and even a big budget zombie movie,
Unidentified Speaker: You are undead.
Anisa Khalifa: Pretty impressive for a woman who completed only six novels, never left her Native England, and has been dead for more than two centuries. And this year she's getting the royal treatment from Jane Knights around the world.
Yes. They have a name. Jane Austen's Legions of fans are celebrating her 250th birthday. And a few months ago I took notice because to my surprise, I found out that one of the events was scheduled to take place in North Carolina.
First off, a good reporter's disclosure, pride and prejudice has been my favorite book since the first time I read it. At age 14, I was an English lit major in college and that nineties BBC miniseries starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy
Mr Darcy: in vain. I have struggled. It will not do. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
Anisa Khalifa: I still have the DVD Box set, even though I haven't owned a DVD player in years, so I pretty much had to go to the Jane Austen summer program. This annual event attracts people from across the us. There are tee times, there's even a ball, and so when I visited in June, I had a lot of questions, but the biggest one was why North Carolina?
Inger Brodey: Well, we just happened to have two Jane Austen scholars at UNC, Chapel Hill, James, and me,
Anisa Khalifa: not just any Jane Austen scholars. This is Inga Brody, director of the program. She runs four different Jane Austen related nonprofits.
Inger Brodey: My colleague James Thompson and I were inspired back in 2012, partly by all the upcoming bi centennials for Austen's publications.
And, um, there had recently been an article out about a program affectionately known as the Charles Dickens Universe in California that had been running for 30 years. And we thought that it sounded really exciting what they did, and we went and visited them.
Anisa Khalifa: That visit inspired Inga and James, who has since retired to found the Jane Austen Summer program, or JASP for short.
It's a four day symposium about the woman and her work, co-sponsored by UNC, chapel Hill and North Carolina Humanities. It combines lectures, discussion groups, and activities that allow attendees to imagine themselves living in Jane Austen's world. Some people even dress up in period clothing. Well,
Inger Brodey: we've had ridicule the, the little purses, um, making workshops and, and various types of hats and cravats and various embroidery sewing, um, workshops so people could get a sense of the things that are alluded to in the literature of the time.
Anisa Khalifa: Jas is designed to bring academia to the broader community in an accessible way. Attendees are a mixture of academics like Inga and regular folks who just love Jane. It also has an educational mission providing resources to K through 12 teachers to help them teach Austen in their classrooms because the only non-con contemporary literature currently required in the North Carolina curriculum is Shakespeare
Inger Brodey: this year, um, about a quarter at least, of the people attending or are either present or former teachers.
From around the country. We have four people here on a free teacher scholarship.
Anisa Khalifa: And even though it gained more attention this year because of the 250th anniversary, Inga made a conscious effort to keep the program intimate. Registration was limited to 150 people like previous events. She chose speakers who wouldn't talk down to the attendees, and everyone went to the same lectures.
Inger Brodey: I also assign people to the discussion groups like planning a dinner party. Um, so I like have a mix of. Of of old and young and different professions, and so there's a lot of care involved in trying to keep the spirit, which is one that's very inclusive.
Anisa Khalifa: But there was one major change to the program this year.
In the past, JASP has been held in the Chapel Hill area, close to the university that hosts it. But this summer it took place 150 miles to the east in New Bern. So why the move
Inger Brodey: with the 250th of Jane Austen's birth and the 250th of the Declaration of Independence coming so close together? We decided that this year and next year's would be, um, focusing on transatlantic themes and experience in Austen.
Anisa Khalifa: The nearly 300 year old town of New Bern is quaint and historic. It served as the capital of North Carolina from 1770 to 1792. So yeah, it makes sense on both of these fronts, but New Bern is also home to something special. An impressive building called Tryon Palace. It was the home of the State's first colonial governor, William Tryon.
When he arrived in 1764, he brought an architect with him so he could build himself a fashionable English style country house. The project sparked a bloody rebellion,
Inger Brodey: and, um, the reason it's called a palace was actually an insult at the time because the, the, uh, nearby landowners in North Carolina. I thought, well, you know, he's acting like a king.
He, why does he need such a fancy place? And indeed, he kept having to need to raise taxes more and more on the landowners. And apparently it was the kind of, uh, flat tax, so the impoverished, uh, people were having to pay as much as the wealthy here around here. So, so it was very, very disruptive and people were angry.
Anisa Khalifa: Those angry colonists were called regulators, and they took part in an armed uprising against Tryon that came to be known as the Regulator War Try On's. Militia eventually won, but it was one of the earliest military clashes between colonists and the crown, a prelude to the American Revolution. And it happened right around the time that Jane Austen was born.
Which is why a tour of Tryon Palace was included in the program.
Unidentified Speaker: I am dressed like the ladies made. Uh,
Anisa Khalifa: this was also part of the immersive experience walking through a replica of a Georgian era house that's been frozen in time. Here I was 250 years later trying to simulate a small part of Austen's world at a country estate that was itself built to represent the ideals of British aristocracy in North Carolina.
It was actually kind of perfect, but this was only one of the many ways these J Knights steeped themselves in the past.
That's coming up after a short break.
Unidentified Speaker: Oh, we have never finished reading hand Maryanne.
Anisa Khalifa: Each edition of the Jane Austen Summer program has a theme. This year, organizers appropriately went back to the very beginning sense and sensibility. Austen's first published novel. It's a story of Maryanne and Eleanor Dashwood two impoverished sisters, seeking a Future and finding true love along the way.
Unidentified Speaker: Doubts that the sun enough move doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubts. I love thee.
Anisa Khalifa: One evening there was a performance of Hamlet, as read by Sense and sensibility characters,
Unidentified Speaker: but I love thee Oh most best. Believe it.
Anisa Khalifa: It's a perfect illustration of how delightfully nerdy this whole four day experience is for these folks. Books are more than just a hobby and fittingly, a fixture of the Gathering is a mobile bookstore.
Amy Patterson: Our bookstore, we have everything from, you know, dress patterns and coloring books to academic titles that are out of print that you can't get anywhere.
Anisa Khalifa: Amy Patterson runs Jane Austen books with her mom, and they've been Jane Knights for a long time.
Amy Patterson: So I've been going to Jane Austen Society meetings since I was a child.
Anisa Khalifa: Amy's talking here about the Jane Austen Society of North America, which has about 5,000 members. They have huge annual meetings featuring high profile guests, like actors from the big Hollywood adaptations, kind of like an English lit comic con.
Amy said that while she loves those gatherings, what makes the much smaller event at Jas different is how interactive it is. Everyone I talked to said half the fun is participating in small group discussions, breakout sessions between lectures where folks dissect topics ranging from carriage design to British inheritance law of the 18 hundreds.
Amy Patterson: When you see other Jane Austen events, sometimes there's specifically targeted to people who want to dress up. Sometimes they're specifically targeted to people who wanna talk about academic topics. I think this. Event threads that needle really well. I think that's why we all appreciate Austen, is she, she tackles very serious subjects with a twinkle in her eye,
Anisa Khalifa: and the epitome of that approach was the event that happened on the final night of the program, a regency ball.
This ball was a huge production. People rented costumes or brought their own hands zone, period, appropriate evening, wear a piano Trio played live music. English country dances were led by Dancing Master, Mr. Charles, step Lively. Real name Jeremy Gershman, who offered lessons ahead of the ball. For first timers, I was even given a dance card to fill out.
We were in the Tryon Palace History Center's large central hall, so it wasn't exactly a smoky ballroom lit by candles dripping wax on our heads. But Amy said it still makes the world of Jane Austen come to life, and for her, that's why it's so important.
Amy Patterson: I, I think there were some people in the past who would sort of sneer at all the fans, they wanna dress up. But when you're standing in that room, even in the modern era with electric lights and air conditioning, you start to get a sense of, man, if I was a 17-year-old girl in London without my parents. Imagine that guy five down is the guy your dad wants you to marry, but you're dancing with a guy you wanna marry and you have to, you have to dread this whole time the dance is gonna come around and that part where you switch partners, you're gonna have to dance with the icky guy and he gets closer and closer to you every time.
Anisa Khalifa: That said, Amy changes the way you read the books. And it's true. The ball was beautiful. I dressed up even though I didn't dance. I felt like I was watching a story I've been reading since childhood come alive in front of me. But it also reminded me that my love for that story is complicated. Just like Austen's heroines, most of the folks who come to Jas are white women, and Jane Austen herself was a white, upper class English woman who wrote almost exclusively about her own circle.
These people were deeply invested in an empire that colonized and exploited my ancestors in South Asia and many other folks across the world, and yet. She is beloved in South Asia. Multiple bestselling Austen adaptations have been written by South Asian women in recent years, and I've devoured them.
Pretty much. Every Bollywood romance film is built upon the scaffolding left for us by Jane Austen, the great grandmother of romantic comedy.
Unidentified Speaker: What's happening now of American Idol? I hope you brought your ear plug. This is great. This is what the girls see, the boys and the boys see the girls.
Anisa Khalifa: So how do we reconcile that love with.
All the rest of it.
Samiha Bala: It is hard for me sometimes because I'm just like, she's not, this world is not my world, and this world could never be my world.
Anisa Khalifa: Samiha Bala is a junior at UNC Chapel Hill and was an intern at this summer's program. It was her first time at Jast, but she jumped at the chance when she heard about the internship,
Samiha Bala: and I submitted an application within like the hour.
Um, 'cause I, I just love Jane Austen. She's probably the, the reason I'm
Anisa Khalifa: studying English. So Mia has found the Jas community incredibly welcoming and inclusive, but as a fellow South Asian, she can relate to my conflicted experience of loving Austen.
Samiha Bala: Some of the stuff I have kind of a hard time with about Jane Austen is like, oh, are we pretending like that didn't exist, just so we can enjoy the pastel?
Like,
Anisa Khalifa: right. Like I, I guess one of my questions is like, are they also talking about like where did all of the fabric for the lovely clothing that they were wearing at that time come from? Where did all the wealth for these, you know, wealthy aristocrats where the main characters in her books come from?
Like, it comes from colonial extraction.
Samiha Bala: There's also, there's going to be a talk. About how, um, the slave trade impacted Jane Austen's novels. So I think we are going to get into it, especially being in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: But Samia says that despite the efforts of organizers to engage with the historical context and its implications, attendees were a little more reluctant.
Samiha Bala: I could feel myself like this past year becoming a little bit jaded about some Jane Austen things where I'm just like, I was just like escapist fantasy wherever, where people get to pretend like. Politics don't exist. Basically it's, it's a really weird dissonance that I'm not sure how to kind of come to terms with everybody here is so kind and so sweet, but it's like also sometimes feels like maybe a tacit little, we're gonna focus on this part of it and not on this part of it.
Anisa Khalifa: Still Samia continues to be an enthusiastic Jay Knight. And she says Jas has given her a new appreciation for the author's, keen Eye for human nature and her timeless way of describing women's lives. Maybe the real truth universally acknowledged is that we all love Jane Austen, and for all the folks I talk to, students and educators, academics, and regular Jane Austen superfans, it's this genius for understanding people.
That makes them come back to her books over and over again.
Ask all of you this question, what does Jane Austen mean to you?
Unidentified Speaker: Jane Austen just has a beautiful way of creating characters, a common person. By making us feel like our personal struggles and joys are universally held. Jane writes exactly what she knows and that is why she is a genius.
Unidentified Speaker: She has such a keen insight on human nature.
You read her books and you think, I know that person.
Anisa Khalifa: Inger Brody, director and co-founder of the program agrees with all of that. But even more importantly, she says that Jane Austen's stories gave us a version of love that was ahead of its time and still resonates today
Inger Brodey: an idea of finding. An equal as a partner, being able to, uh, maintain independence and find equality and, and mutual respect, but also love and marriage and permanence.
When people talk about Jane Austen ruined my life, or Jane Austen wrecked my life, it's often. Because when they fail to find it or life doesn't live up to, um, these ideals, people feel disappointed.
Anisa Khalifa: I can relate to that.
Anisa Khalifa: As for the program itself, Inga is proud of the community. She's helped create, but next year she's stepping down to let someone else take charge.
JASP will move to Pennsylvania to celebrate America's 250th birthday. In the meantime, Inga has plenty of work to keep her busy, and she has Jane Austen, what's your favorite book?
Inger Brodey: Ooh, that's always hard. My long answer is that North Anger Abby is the funniest that pride and Prejudice is the most perfect, that Emma is her biggest artistic achievement.
That Mansfield Park is the most philosophically profound, and that persuasion is the most beautiful.
Anisa Khalifa: That feels like cheating, but I'll allow it. Since you're a Jane Austen scholar.
Inger Brodey: well, okay. If I had to pick one, it would be persuasion.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and edited by Jerad Walker. The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond, and Executive Producer Wilson Sayre. Special thanks this week to Inga Brody, and the rest of the folks at the Jane Austen Summer Program. For welcoming me into their world for a weekend.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or review or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.