Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday Year & What Teaching Her Taught Me About Life & Writing

/ Rebecca J. Whitman

December 16th, 2025 is Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday. This semiquincentennial celebration has been celebrated all over the world already with special festivals, readings, reenactments, and more. I am pleased to hear she is important enough to even be on a bank note in London now. In Bath, you can visit her museum and book tickets for festivals and experiences. In America, you can learn all about her in the Jane Austen Collaborative including Summer Programs for Teachers and a whole bunch of research and interactive materials. I can only imagine how big the celebration will actually be on December 16th.

Jane Austen is loved in many ways in America. For those of us Janeites who are English teachers, we teach her books in our classes. Pride and Prejudice has been my go to for years in my English 4 class because it my favorite of all of them, but this year I was challenged to find a new book to give some love. I read Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility all at roughly the same time. It was crazy to me how much Austen’s voice and purpose changed in each book. The cadence and flow, the storytelling mastery that I loved in P&P were washed out or gone completely in some of them. The memorable lines of P&P from that opening line to Darcy’s confession of love were just missing entirely in Sense & Sensibility. As a movie, it is close, but as a book, I found myself constantly stopping and restarting to figure out what was happening. Jane Austen shouldn’t be that hard to follow. She was well ahead of her time for engaging her readers.

Jane Austen as sketched by her sister, Cassandra, to whom she wrote many letters. 2025 © Copyright National Portrait Gallery

What surprised me as I read the other books was how much of an activist Jane Austen really was. In Emma, she was well into her career and chose to take on a character she knew she would love more than her readers. Emma is fiesty, independent, and does not need a man. If she falls in love and marries, it is by choice not society’s force. She goes against the customs of her day and embraces her own dreams for her life. From the first page, I found her character very intriguing and modern. It made me love Jane Austen as a writer more because she was taking risks and being a voice for change.

In Persuasion, there was a similar activist purpose. In this book, the main character is dealing with a lot of society pressure to do things and live to certain standards. It cost her a marriage to the man she really loved and overspending made her family have to downsize to become more fiscally responsible. These were big ideas to take on in an Austen novel. Usually social commentary is something you would expect more in Dickens or Bronte, but Austen was finding her way to do it too. It may have taken her getting into a groove and becoming popular enough to afford being able to take a risk, but she still did it.

Northanger Abbey was a surprise of a different kind. In this little book, Austen talks directly to the reader several times about writing! Not only does she reveal some historical shade on reading novels, but she gives her own opinion on the issue in general. She talks about writing and the importance of reading all while showing a character who took her love of reading too far. Northanger Abbey was a coming of age novel. It was a little slow to get into and very dated in the details, but the story did catch our attention. Anything this old that can capture a teenager’s attention deserves recognition.

What Austen Taught Me As a Woman

I have always admired Austen for being a woman who took care of herself and provided a living for herself while she was single and living with family. Austen never married, and that has always made me sad. How could someone write about love and relationships with so much clarity and focus, yet not be able to secure it for herself? Maybe someday I will do a deeper dive into her letters and personal correspondence to get to know Austen better, but for now it is just a dull question in the back of my mind…why?

If anything, I think the answer is in Persuasion. Supposedly Austen had a man pursue her and she wanted to say yes to him, but her family did not approve. Persuasion is a similar story, but with a much better ending. Sometimes I wonder if Austen’s writing wasn’t just trying to make her own happy endings and life choices over again. Why didn’t she show the activism on her pages within her own four walls? Maybe she did and we just don’t know it.

Still, regardless of her love life, Austen was a fierce woman for her time and someone to admire even today. She has left a mark and told us women that we are capable of so much more than our culture may dictate. If I could interview her today, I think Austen’s advice to young women would be “if you have a dream, pursue it; don’t let anything hold you down.”

What Austen Taught Me As a Writer

Reading so many Austen books at once gave me the chance to focus on the common threads between them. I would listen to how the character development progressed and later novels were stronger than early work (with the exception of P&P). I also listened for a familiar structure, cadence, or form. I realized that we writers do develop a style that is pretty hard to get away from no matter what the topic may be. Austen’s style is conversational, approachable prose with a lot of dialogue to show the story more than tell it. l found the books that were good were the ones that did this. The rest were just hard to get into.

I also came to the realization that the really great writers in the world are those that use their platform for good.

Dickens used his writing to encourage reform in society (for example child labor and poverty). Bronte also spoke about education reform and other society issues. Austen entertained us with romance but made us question our society norms at the same time. Women were held back in her time, and her honesty with this repression on the page changed things for women in the future. I believe the great writers like Dickens, Bronte, and Austen were great and unforgettable not just because they were good story-tellers but because they used their skills to make a difference in the world around them. After all, what other purpose can be there be for an artist than to hold a mirror to their world and ask them to make it better?

Uniquely R’s and The Gladstone: A Local Treasure Gives Culture to WCC Students

/ Rebecca J. Whitman / 2 Comments

Just beyond the curtain door at the back of a little shop, there is a special place for art and history in downtown Goldsboro, NC called The Gladstone. Dark wood walls and a crystal chandelier hanging from an antique tiled ceiling give this place a Golden Age feel. An upright piano frequently plays classical music and artists that serve coffee, tea, and pastries often sing along there. Occasionally a visitor pops in with his/her instrument, sits in one of the tall wingback chairs, and belts out a series of folk tunes.

The Gladstone
Katie and Michael cleaning up after our party

Making a place for artists and people to feel welcomed and inspired was part of the owner’s vision. Her welcoming heart is present in every creative display, quirky item selection, and ornate fixture. Uniquely R’s offers customers an opportunity to experience a richer culture than their own and buy things they couldn’t possibly find anywhere else. Guests are drawn in by the quaint, enchanting floral patio entrance. They are curious about what lies beyond the water fountain and tables. They come to support a local business, but they end up transported to another time and place. The Gladstone gives guests an opportunity to sit and soak in that different time and place; it is the pride of the shop, Uniquely R’s, and the heart of its owner, Ruth Glisson.

In such a place, I get big ideas.

As an English teacher, I always struggle with making British literature relevant to my students. They have a hard time grasping the concepts and language of classics like Austen and Shakespeare. They don’t understand Victorian customs and practices; all things British seem old and unnecessary to them. How could I make them see the beauty in a bygone era? How could I make them truly understand and love the classics they had to read? The answer: let them experience it.

My big idea: bring students to The Gladstone and let them experience a foreign culture firsthand. l mentioned the idea to Ruth Glisson, and she loved it. Many months later, a travelling show was set to come to Paramount Theatre and present “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged”. It was the perfect timing and opportunity to take my English 4 students out for a cultural experience. I wrote a grant to the Foundation of Wayne Community College, and got approved! I was never so proud as when I got to walk into Uniquely R’s and talk business with Ruth. The party we planned was special, but the end result exceeded my wildest imagination. On April, 16, 2016, nine students and myself were treated like royalty.

My students had just read Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, so we made a high tea themed around Pride and Prejudice. We had custom menus and music from the movie version–which we had watched in class–of the book. Courses came out in shiny tiered trays as the host (me) gave the nod to move forward. Ruth explained the history of tea and tea parties during the Victorian era as well as the history behind each food choice in our course. We began with savories then sweets with three drink choices along the way.

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The students were encouraged to dress up for the occasion. While some were not able to do so, others dressed up in suits, dresses, and hats. Regardless of their dress, every person there sat a little bit taller and prouder that night. They felt special…treasured…loved.

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Students looked around the store afterwards, and Ruth continued educating them on what different things were for. Many students said they would like to come back there again with their loved ones. Many of us lingered; we didn’t want to leave. However, we still had a play to attend.
The play was well attended and did a good job of making Shakespeare relevant and hilarious. I personally didn’t like seeing all the comedies of Shakespeare condensed into one story plot and the tragedies given full representation, but I expected something to be short changed in an abridged play anyways. I was thankful for the way the play made modern audiences laugh at Shakespeare the way they would have in his time. The intent of the lines–even the raunchiness at times–was not altered. As the three actors ran around the stage and in and out of costumes, we couldn’t help but laugh. 

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 Later, students would tell me that this event gave them the chance to “actually live the life style” and “examine the fine things that have been so well kept over the years”. Of the play, they said it “got into the love, pain, betrayal, and lies within the stories, but told (it) in a way…it would reach out to our…generation”. They liked the way the tea party and the play made them get involved with the literature and experience it first-hand. One student even said:

I thought it was the most beautiful night I’ve had in a long time and convinced me to go out and live my dreams as an actor or performer of some kind.

We English teachers hope to infuse the love of literature into our students. We want the words to come to life to them the way they do for us. The looks on my students’ faces that night said it had done just that. April 16, 2016 is a night we will never forget.

 

Much thanks to Uniquely R’s and the Foundation of Wayne Community College for making this experience possible.