except for purposes of quarrels about
trivia? Here’s just one reason: Janeites are
known for having organized their net-
works in an almost magically prescient
way that didn’t just prefigure S tar Trek
fan culture, it prefigured the ... internet.
Go with me here. Janeites can be seen
as internet cultureavant la lettre—what
Sebastian Heath, an archaeologist and
professor of computational humanities
and Roman archaeology at New York
University, calls a “self-digitizing com-
munity.” OK, yes, the Arpanet and packet
switching don’t figure much in the mis-
online forums dedicated to phenomena
from S tar Trek to Game of Thrones to
Hamilton to Doctor Who:- Janeites feel free to speak of fictional
characters—Miss Bates, Elinor Dashwood,
etc.—as though they are real people.
(Furthermore, according to latter-day
Janeite Ted Scheinman, they speak of
Austen herself with “the proprietary vim
of a family member.”) - They tolerate gentle teasing of their
fandom but balk at criticism of their
canon. - They are meticulously detail-
adventures of Emma Woodhouse or the
Bennet sisters. But the Janeites represent
a critical plot point in the evolution of
online sociology.
In the beginning, Janeites were some-
thing like an especially enthusiastic book
club. They changed as Austen’s work got
canonized and exported, but at first they
were chiefly English men. In this way,
they were unlike Trekkies and perhaps
closer to the zealous male fans—many of
whom identify as gay—of female super-
stars like Liza Minnelli or Cher.
In their devotion, according to Clau-
dia Johnson in Janeites: Austen’s Disci-
ples and Devotees, Janeites expressed
“the ecstasy of the elect.” The novel-
ist E. M. Forster and the literary scholar
A.C.Bradley were among the first prom-
inent Janeites, who, with only a touch of
self-parody, described themselves as a
“cult” devoted to their “dear,” “divine”
Jane. The group’s playfulness and ecstasy
let them blow past the rules of solemn
scholarship. And thus the Janeites set
in motion six practices that now define
modern fan culture, and in particular the
oriented, priding themselves on know-
ing Austen minutiae as much as literary
themes. (Among the Janeites are students
of Regency suspender buckles, agrarian
history, English country dances.)- They are secretive—and often
abashed. (Forster once wrote: “I am a Jane
Austenite, and, therefore, slightly imbe-
cile about Jane Austen.”) - Their fandom is considered slightly
unwholesome. (Just as Trekkies are par-
odied as pimple-pocked teens in Spock
ears, female Janeites today are derided
as spinster cat ladies.) - They move comfortably between
fiction and reality, the spectral and the
solid, the fantastic and the real, the forum
and the meetup. They often bridge the
gap with fan fiction and cosplay.
To seal their in-group status and steer
clear of Muggles who might not get it,
Janeites today still use code, handles,
jargon, masquerade, memes. Generally
speaking, a “Willoughby” is a cad, and
a “Darcy” is a catch (though maybe also
kind of a dick). The code acts as hom-
age to the days when Janeites flew studi-
homophobia of haters was hard to miss.
Heath coined the phrase “self-digitizing
community” in 2011 to describe any group
that “takes the time to organize infor-
mation about itself or information that it
cares about” by making its artifacts leg-
ible, archivable, and searchable. Ancient
numismatics, he has argued, were part of
Rome’s self-digitization; the coins made
crucial aspects of the Roman Empire
retrievable by future historians and
archaeologists. In modern times, Heath
cites the superb wiki of Game of Thrones
aficionados, which makes their commu-
nity accessible and (mostly) intelligible,
even to those outside it.
For their part, Janeites riffed off Jane
Austen’s written work, which they made
supremely accessible to Austen readers
without advanced degrees by creating
indices, committing passages to mem-
ory, reenacting scenes, anatomizing the
film adaptations, and extending the nov-
els with fan fiction in which they, real
people, interact with Darcy and Bingley
and Knightley and all the rest.
Then there’s Heath’s most challengingJaneites set in motion practices that now define
modern fan culture, in particular the online forums
dedicated to phenomena from Star Trek to Game
of Thrones to Hamilton to Doctor Who.
ously below the radar. Kipling’s story “The
Janeites” tells of a group of World War I
vets who were closet Janeites. There’s
gender-bending too. Janeites who may
be super butch in light of day privately
visit spheres coded female: domestic-
ity, romance, social life. All of this has
stirred anxiety among out-group tradi-
tionalists. In a hatchet job on Austen and
her disciples given as a speech in 1928,
one critic derided her—and her fans—as
sexless, malicious, and girlish. As Forster
was gay and other early Janeites—includ-
ing Bradley—were lifelong bachelors, the