This is Episode 5 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

It is, when you stop to think about it, one of the strangest love affairs in literary history. Here is a country founded on tearing up the rule book of aristocracy, of inherited rank, of who married whom — a nation that fought a war precisely to be free of all of it. And what does it do? It falls utterly and permanently for a clergyman’s daughter from Hampshire who wrote six novels about the English gentry. Americans fill ballrooms in Regency gowns. They queue for Chawton. They’ve given the world Clueless, Bridget Jones, and Mr. Darcy fighting zombies. Mark Twain loathed her so passionately he said he wanted to dig her up — and lost, comprehensively, to his own countrymen. Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, who holds a PhD from the University of Kent, is the author of Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen and There’s Something About Darcy, and is the creative director of Strictly Jane Austen — so there is nobody better placed to explain what draws people across an ocean to walk in Austen’s footsteps. The conversation starts with the tote bag that started it all: Gabrielle moved to Bath, saw students and tourists carrying bags reading “I ♥ Darcy,” and realized no other character in English literature could possibly warrant one. Along the way: why everybody calls her Jane and nobody calls Dickens Charlie; the Netherfield scene that demonstrates exactly how Austen gets inside everyone’s head at once; her genuinely provocative argument that Americans recognized Austen’s contribution before the English did; the Victorian children’s novel in which an American girl visits Austen’s grave and the cathedral warden has no idea who she’s talking about; why male academics were still dismissing Austen as a romance writer within living memory; what makes Darcy structurally different from Rochester and Heathcliff — he is the one who actually changes, rather than needing to be set on fire first; why the 1995 adaptation and the growth of the internet were a tandem phenomenon; why Austen fandom is, improbably, the kindest corner of the internet; and why Bath — a city Austen never much liked — became the heart of the pilgrimage.

🎀 OUR SPONSOR: STRICTLY JANE AUSTEN

This entire six-part series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath’s most Austentatious travel company. Today’s guest, Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, is their creative director, and in this episode she explains exactly what she was brought in to build.

Gabrielle’s role is to recruit the speakers and specialists — experts in Georgian embroidery, fashion, architecture and gardens, the literary history of Austen’s writing and her family — so that guests spend each day of a residency doing something different. Guests stay at the Gainsborough Bath Spa, with access to the warm spa waters, the opportunity to dress in Regency costume (which in Bath, as Gabrielle notes, causes nobody to bat an eyelid), and the chance to actually spend time with those speakers rather than simply hear them. Novelist Gill Hornby, whose Miss Austen has now been dramatized for television, has been among them.

And if you want a shorter visit, the expert guided walk is the thing: an architectural historian or literary specialist who will take you to the nooks and crannies of Jane Austen’s Bath — Sydney Place and Sydney Gardens, Gay Street, the Old Theatre Royal, Milsom Street — the places we know from her letters that she shopped, bought her walking boots, and bought the stationery she wrote them on.

What they offer:

• Expert Guided Tours of Jane Austen’s Bath — Private walking tours led by expert Janeite guides
• Period Dress Hire & Afternoon Tea in Bath — Regency costume delivered to your hotel, then promenade through Bath and take afternoon tea in a historic tearoom
• Bridgerton in Bath — The city’s Bridgerton filming locations and Regency high society
• Jane Austen & Bath’s Gothic History Twilight Tour — Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, and the darker side of Regency Bath
• Discovering Jane — A Three-Night Travel Experience in Bath & Hampshire — The full immersive short break, including Jane’s Hampshire home and burial place
• Escape to Bath by Rail from London — Paddington to Austen’s Bath in style
• Bespoke Group Tours of Bath & Hampshire — For individuals, couples, book clubs and groups of any size
• Annual Jane Austen Celebrations — Dance, discussion and Regency merriment at the Gainsborough Bath Spa
• 🎁 Gift Vouchers — The perfect present for the Janeite in your life

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)
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Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programs since 1993.

Links

Our Guest

• There’s Something About Darcy: The Curious Appeal of Jane Austen’s Bewitching Hero
• Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen — the collected essays that came out of the I-♥-Darcy tote bag
• Gabrielle Malcolm at Intellect Books
• Strictly Jane Austen — where she is creative director

Austen Societies & Events

• The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) — founded 1979
• JASNA 2025 Annual General Meeting — “Austen at 250,” Baltimore — Gabrielle’s first, attended with Susannah Harker
• The Jane Austen Society (UK) — the more traditionally academic British society Gabrielle has begun working with
• The Jane Austen Centre, Bath

Places of Pilgrimage

• Jane Austen’s House, Chawton — the cottage, restored
• Chawton House — the Great House at the top of the village, barely changed
• Winchester Cathedral — where Austen is buried, in the north nave aisle
• The Roman Baths & Pump Room, Bath
• Theatre Royal Bath
• The Gainsborough Bath Spa — where the Strictly Jane Austen residencies are based
• Visit Bath — for Milsom Street, Gay Street, Sydney Place, Sydney Gardens, the Royal Crescent and the Circus
• St Swithin’s, Walcot, Bath — where Austen’s parents married and her father George is buried

Previous Episodes in This Series

• Robert Morrison on The Regency Years
• Dr. Moira Rudolf on the darker side of Georgian Bath
• Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm on Austen’s filming locations
• Theresa Roach on the people who made Jane Austen

Anglotopia

• Friends of Anglotopia Club
• Anglotopia Store

Takeaways

1. Gabrielle’s route into Austen fandom ran through a Victorian sensation novelist. For her PhD she deciphered the notebooks of Mary Elizabeth Braddon — a friend of Wilkie Collins — reading the crossings-out and false starts of a novelist at work. That changed how she read everything afterward, Austen included: she had never thought about the shaping of a novel as a reader.
2. Then she moved to Bath and saw the tote bags. Students and tourists carrying “I ♥ Darcy.” She realized no other character in English literature could sustain that object — not Mr. Rochester, not any of Dickens’s heroes, because as she puts it, “they were really sketchy, shady people.”
3. The clearest sign of Austen’s unique hold is that everybody calls her Jane. Brontë fans distinguish Charlotte, Emily and Anne out of necessity, but nobody calls Dickens Charles or Charlie. Austen readers talk about her as though they know her — which Gabrielle traces directly to the free indirect style that puts her in the room, mediating between character and reader.
4. Her demonstration of that is the Netherfield scene with Elizabeth’s muddy petticoat. We go round the room and hear what each character privately thinks: Bingley finds her a lovely sister, Miss Bingley is disgusted, Darcy notices the walk has brightened her cheeks — and Mr. Hurst is thinking about his breakfast. It’s a tour of several minds in a few lines, capped with a deliberate bathos.
5. Gabrielle’s answer to the central paradox is that Austen’s appeal to America is because of the revolutionary founding, not in spite of it. Austen was born in 1775 and grew up amid revolutionary politics — her cousin Eliza’s husband was guillotined. Her heroines push back. Elizabeth telling Lady Catherine “he is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter — so far we are equals” is the line Gabrielle reaches for, and it nearly makes Lady Catherine faint.
6. That same quality is why Austen travels beyond the English-speaking world. She is popular in India, the Middle East, Brazil and Italy because, Gabrielle argues, she speaks to a universal compulsion to rebel against whoever is trying to tell you what your life should be. Jonathan adds the complementary point: humans everywhere build stratification, and America has its own invisible class system.
7. Her most provocative claim is that Americans recognized Austen’s contribution before the English did. Her evidence is a wonderful piece of Victorian literary tourism: in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next, an American girl travels to lay flowers on Austen’s grave and the cathedral warden effectively asks “Jane who?”
8. Readers never stopped loving Austen — her books have never been out of print — but critical reception ebbed and flowed, and she wasn’t in the academic canon while Scott and Dickens were. It took post-war feminist scholarship to bring Austen, the Brontës and Eliot in as serious literature. Gabrielle was a student while male academics were still dismissing Austen as a romance writer. The same thing happened in translation, where she arrived in languages like Italian packaged as pure romance, hearts and flowers on the cover.
9. What makes Darcy durable isn’t the brooding — Goethe and Byron had already built that type — it’s that he changes, and he does most of it offstage. Elizabeth doesn’t change him; she shows him what he is, and he becomes a better man for knowing her. Gabrielle’s comparison is brutal and funny: Rochester only improves after Charlotte Brontë half burns him to death and blinds him, and Heathcliff never improves at all.
10. Austen fandom online is, improbably, the nice part of the internet. The most heated the argument ever gets is Colin Firth versus Matthew Macfadyen — and Gabrielle has seen groups retire even that, on the grounds that you like what you like. She connects it back to Austen’s own warmth about friendship: Elizabeth and Charlotte, Marianne and Elinor, and behind them Jane and Cassandra.

Soundbites

1. “I just saw all these people in Bath, students and tourists with tote bags that said ‘I heart Darcy’ on them. And I thought — is there any other character in the whole of English literature that would warrant that? You could never have that for Mr. Rochester.” — Gabrielle on the moment her research changed direction.
2. “Everybody talks about Jane, and they talk about her as if they know her. You don’t call Dickens Charles or Charlie.”
3. “What that boils down to is that she is in the room, mediating between character and reader in a very persuasive and psychologically adept way. And she does it in such a charming and witty way that you just can’t help but like her.”
4. “Mr. Bingley is thinking what a lovely sister she is. Miss Bingley is thinking this is disgusting. Mr. Darcy is thinking she’s gorgeous and the walk has made her cheeks even brighter. And then Mr. Hurst is thinking about his breakfast.” — Gabrielle on the Netherfield scene.
5. “He says ‘every time I open Jane Austen’ — which means he reads her repeatedly. It just makes him furious that she’s so good. Whether he liked her or not, Jane Austen was inevitable.” — Gabrielle on Mark Twain.
6. “The Americans appreciated her, and her contribution, before the English did. A person in their own country is without honor. We were the last people to build a Globe Theatre for Shakespeare.”
7. “When I was a student, Jane Austen was still being disparaged by largely male academics just dismissing her as a romance writer. And you think — she’s more than that.”
8. “Elizabeth does the thing that we’ve always been told you can’t possibly do with a man. You can’t change him. No — she shows him for what he is, and he becomes a better man for knowing Elizabeth. And that’s the lightning in a bottle of Pride and Prejudice.”
9. “Mr. Rochester only changes after he’s half been burnt to death and blinded. Charlotte Brontë has to smash him over the head with a piece of burning timber for him to wake up. He’s an absolute monster. Heathcliff is terrible. These men are awful.”
10. “The most heated they get is: who is the best Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen? That’s as heated as they get. You can’t stay angry for very long, and definitely not in an Austen group.”

Chapters

• 00:46 Welcome & Our Sponsor — Strictly Jane Austen
• 01:28 Today’s Guest Is the Creative Director — With Delight, Not a Disclaimer
• 01:44 AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH JANE AUSTEN
• 01:52 One of the Strangest Love Affairs in Literary History
• 01:56 A Nation That Fought a War to Be Free of All of It
• 02:08 Regency Ballrooms, Chawton Queues, and Darcy Fighting Zombies
• 02:16 Mark Twain Wanted to Dig Her Up — And Lost
• 02:28 Meet Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm
• 03:07 HOW SHE CAME TO THIS
• 03:12 Why Fandom Rather Than Prose?
• 03:29 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and a Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter
• 04:04 Deciphering a Victorian Novelist’s Notebooks
• 04:40 Returning to Austen and Seeing the Shaping of a Novel
• 05:13 THE I-HEART-DARCY TOTE BAG
• 05:47 “You Could Never Have That for Mr. Rochester”
• 05:59 The Jane Austen Centre and a Festival Gathering Momentum
• 06:20 Why Are People This Passionate About Her?
• 06:33 Why Isn’t There a Dickens Society Filling Ballrooms?
• 07:03 Obsessive Brontë Fans and Dickens Festivals Do Exist
• 07:31 But the Scale of Devotion Has No Comparison
• 07:36 EVERYBODY CALLS HER JANE
• 08:02 Nobody Calls Dickens Charlie
• 08:10 She Is in the Room — The Free Indirect Style
• 09:04 “You Just Can’t Help But Like Her as a Person”
• 09:09 Dickens, By Contrast, Was Quite Unpleasant
• 09:38 THE MUDDY PETTICOAT AT NETHERFIELD
• 09:54 Round the Room, Mind by Mind
• 10:08 And Mr. Hurst Is Thinking About His Breakfast
• 10:30 Bathos, and Mr. Hurst’s Famous Line
• 10:41 “WE RECREATE AUSTEN FOR OUR TIME”
• 11:18 Archetypes People Recognize Without Reading Her
• 11:43 The Victorian Jane — “Dear Aunt Jane,” Shaped by Family Memoirs
• 12:00 The 20th-Century Jane — Theatricality and Episodic Drama
• 12:26 Why the 19th-Century Novel Translates So Well to Television
• 12:44 “What Would She Have Thought of This?”
• 12:53 Amy Heckerling’s Clueless Channeling Emma
• 13:01 THE PARADOX AT THE HEART OF THE EPISODE
• 13:10 A Country Founded on Rejecting Inherited Rank
• 13:19 Gabrielle’s Answer: Precisely Because of the Revolution
• 13:35 Born in 1775, Into a Landscape of Revolutionary Politics
• 14:06 Cousin Eliza, and a Husband Guillotined
• 14:45 “I AM A GENTLEMAN’S DAUGHTER”
• 15:03 Lady Catherine Nearly Faints
• 15:12 “Are the Shades of Pemberley to Be Thus Polluted?”
• 15:14 Drama About Class Consciousness and Social Mobility
• 15:33 Relating to Elizabeth, Harriet Smith, Marianne Dashwood
• 16:00 Why She Travels — India, the Middle East, Brazil, Italy
• 16:19 A Universal Compulsion to Rebel
• 16:28 Jonathan: Humans Always Build Stratification
• 16:48 The Opportunity to Push Back
• 17:09 Jane Herself — The Satirists, and Mary Wollstonecraft
• 17:27 Samuel Johnson, and a Forward-Thinking Father
• 17:56 A Library of 500 Books at Steventon
• 18:15 Looking Forward Rather Than Harking Back
• 18:22 MARK TWAIN
• 18:33 “Every Time I Open Jane Austen” — Which Means He Reread Her
• 19:00 Charlotte Brontë Didn’t Enjoy Her Either
• 19:11 A Patchy 19th-Century Reception
• 20:30 The Fever of the Century Was the Novel
• 19:50 Circulating Libraries, and How People Actually Read
• 20:23 Before Jane Austen and After Jane Austen
• 20:52 John Mullan on the Structure of Emma
• 21:04 “Whether You Like Her or Not, She’s Undeniable”
• 21:14 WHEN DID AMERICA FALL FOR HER?
• 21:25 Gabrielle’s Controversial Answer
• 21:43 “A Person in Their Own Country Is Without Honor”
• 21:51 We Were the Last to Build a Globe Theatre
• 21:58 “JANE WHO?” — Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next
• 22:10 Flowers on the Grave at Winchester
• 22:46 More Recognition as the American Novel Emerged
• 23:11 Nobody Studied Novels Until Well Into the 20th Century
• 23:22 Austen Wasn’t in the Canon — Scott and Dickens Were
• 23:27 Post-War Feminism Brought Eliot, Austen and the Brontës In
• 23:41 “Still Being Disparaged by Largely Male Academics”
• 23:57 Readers Always Loved Her — Critics Wobbled
• 24:42 Reframed by Recent Scholarship, Much of It American
• 24:49 Devoney Looser, and Getting Rid of the Myths
• 25:09 AUSTEN IN TRANSLATION
• 25:23 Packaged as Romance, Hearts and Flowers on the Cover
• 26:03 Translating Her Character Into Swedish
• 26:23 JASNA
• 26:37 How American Fandom Differs
• 26:41 “More Everything About the American Fandom”
• 26:54 Her First JASNA, Baltimore, for the 250th
• 27:05 How Americans Pursue Their Hobbies
• 27:32 Feeding the Beast — More Films, More Fandom
• 27:47 Sitting Next to the Academic World
• 28:00 The UK Society Is More Traditionally Academic
• 28:19 Gabrielle’s Work to Bring Some JASNA Flair to Britain
• 28:35 American Passion vs. British Restraint
• 28:51 Would Darcy Approve? Not at All — But Elizabeth and Lydia Would
• 29:06 THE INTERNET AND AUSTEN DISCOURSE
• 29:24 1995 and the Growth of the Internet, in Tandem
• 29:57 By 2005, Another Generation Found It All Waiting
• 30:19 THE LOVELY SIDE OF THE INTERNET
• 30:57 Firth or Macfadyen — As Heated as It Gets
• 31:10 “We’re Not Having This Argument Anymore”
• 31:16 Fellowship, and Austen’s Warmth About Friendship
• 31:44 Jane and Cassandra Behind It All
• 32:17 Jonathan on Fandoms That Destroy Themselves
• 32:36 Balls, Trinkets, Georgian Crafting and New Mugs
• 33:13 At JASNA With Susannah Harker
• 33:35 SPOILER — Susannah Harker Is Coming to This Series
• 33:43 THE 1995 ADAPTATION
• 33:50 That Lake, That Shirt, That House
• 34:04 PBS, and the Modern American Austen Boom
• 34:14 Everything Austen Dates From 1995
• 34:30 And It Coincided With the Box Set
• 35:24 Andrew Davies and the Crafting of Tension
• 35:40 Shot on Location Instead of in Studios
• 36:21 Before That, the Sets Were Very Shaky
• 36:36 Getting the Heroines Out Into Nature, Where Austen Put Them
• 37:05 Giving American Viewers the English Landscape in Detail
• 37:28 “And Andrew Davies Injecting a Good Deal of Sex Appeal”
• 37:33 WHAT IS MR. DARCY, EXACTLY?
• 38:02 Goethe and Byron Got There First
• 38:23 Why Darcy Could Be Cherry-Picked and Reinvented
• 39:01 The Thing Most Authors Don’t Do
• 39:20 Picaresque Heroes Never Learned Their Lessons
• 39:33 DARCY CHANGES — AND MOSTLY OFFSTAGE
• 40:03 Elizabeth Doesn’t Change Him. She Shows Him Himself.
• 40:19 “The Lightning in a Bottle of Pride and Prejudice”
• 40:51 The Insulting Proposal, and Being Told to Get Knotted
• 41:13 The Long, Long Letter, and the Start of His Growth
• 41:28 Elizabeth as Revolutionary Heroine
• 41:43 WHY ROCHESTER AND HEATHCLIFF DON’T COUNT
• 41:49 Half Burnt to Death and Blinded
• 42:06 “Heathcliff Is Terrible. These Men Are Awful.”
• 42:25 Darcy, Mrs. Bennet, and Parallel Bad Manners
• 42:41 MRS. BENNET WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG
• 42:58 Right About Bingley and Jane
• 43:11 The Entailed Estate, Five Daughters, and a Ticking Clock
• 43:30 LITERARY TOURISM — Why Go There at All?
• 43:45 Understanding the Physical World of the Author
• 44:15 Chawton Cottage, Restored
• 44:32 Chawton House, Barely Changed
• 44:45 Hampshire Villages, 200 Years On
• 44:57 Bath as a World Heritage Site, Frozen in Time
• 45:22 WALKING MILSOM STREET
• 45:43 The Very Facades Austen Saw
• 46:00 The Pump Rooms and the Old Theatre Royal
• 46:17 Why the Adaptations Use the Royal Crescent — And Why Jane Didn’t Live There
• 46:36 Middle Class, Then Dropping Down After Her Father Died
• 46:57 SHE DIDN’T LIKE BATH — So Why Is It the Heart of the Pilgrimage?
• 47:41 Her Father’s Death Colored Everything There
• 47:59 Densely Populated, Polluted, Unpleasant After Hampshire
• 48:20 Long Walks Up the Steep Hills for Fresh Air
• 48:29 But Bath Was Fertile — It Gave Her Tension and Conflict
• 48:40 Things Happen in Bath, and at the Seaside
• 49:21 “This Is Where Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth Were Reunited”
• 49:49 The Light on the Bath Stone
• 50:15 The Avon Valley, and Why the Romans Settled Here
• 50:56 STRICTLY JANE AUSTEN — What Gabrielle Was Brought In to Build
• 51:35 Recruiting the Speakers and Specialists
• 51:41 The Gainsborough, and the Warm Spa Waters
• 52:04 Regency Costume, and Nobody Batting an Eyelid
• 52:33 Spending Time With the Experts, Not Just Hearing Them
• 53:06 Gill Hornby and the Miss Austen Connection
• 53:36 Friendships Built Over a Week
• 53:51 Booking a Package With an Expert Guide
• 54:09 Sydney Place, Gay Street, the Old Theatre Royal, Milsom Street
• 54:25 Where She Bought Her Walking Boots and Her Stationery
• 54:52 ADVICE FOR A FIRST AUSTEN PILGRIMAGE
• 55:06 Get a Couple of Hours With an Expert Guide First
• 55:26 Then Walk the City Yourself
• 55:56 St Swithin’s — Where Her Parents Married and Her Father Is Buried
• 56:18 And Where Her Aunt Was Arrested for Shoplifting
• 56:31 Wrap-Up & Our Sponsor

Video Version