Reading Jane Austen in the 21st Century with Patricia A. Matthew

250 years after her birth, Jane Austen is more popular than ever, with the publication of new editions of her novels and numerous new film adaptations in production. But what does it mean to read and edit Jane Austen today through the lens of colonialism, cartography, and race? 

Scholar Patricia A. Matthew, who recently edited new editions of three Austen novels, joins us to explore the ongoing fascination with Jane and share new research about the Regency era.

During her fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Matthew examined archival materials, including legal texts, maps, travel logs, and legal documents, to gain a better understanding of colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean. She looked at how empire and enslavement wealth from the new world, slavery, and race informed (or didn’t)  the literature and visual culture of the 18th– and 19th–century Britain. This research now shapes Matthew’s new annotated editions of Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park. 

From overlooked maps folded into rare books to questions of literary escapism and cultural memory, Matthew offers a rich and expansive perspective on Jane Austen in 2025. 

>> Pre-order Patricia Matthew’s new editions of Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey from Penguin Classics, and Mansfield Park from Norton Library. 

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 12, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Patricia A. Matthew is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, where she teaches courses on the History of the Novel and Romantic abolitionist culture.  She writes about Regency-era literature and culture for scholars and the public in journals and publications including Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Women’s Writing, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. She co-edits the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. She is also director of the Race and Regency Lab and editor of Penguin Random House’s 250th anniversary editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.  Winner of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the British Association for Romanticism Studies, she is currently writing a book about abolition, material culture, and gender for Princeton University Press. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.  

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Many of the programs and scholarship at the Folger focus, of course, on Shakespeare and his world.

But our research library contains hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts, maps, posters, playbills, and lots of other rare materials. Researchers working in many fields other than Shakespeare studies find our collections useful.

So today, we’re going to take a little detour from our usual subject matter. We’re going to hear from Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey teaching British literature.

Matthew recently completed a fellowship at the Folger, studying colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean. That research helped inform her new editions of Jane Austen’s novels Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park.

Here’s Patricia Matthew, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, you wrote a piece in The Atlantic in 2017 called “On Teaching, But Not Loving Jane Austen.” So how is it that we’re here now talking about her? And what did you not love about her?

PATRICIA MATTHEW: I think that there’s not a delicate way to say this.

BOGAEV: Go right ahead. It’s not a delicate podcast.

MATTHEW: Austen is fine. A great writer. She tells wonderful stories. She knows her milieu. She represents it and recreates it in really amazing ways. It can be tricky to be in the Austen world with scholars, critics, and fans who are deeply attached to their understanding of her. I think that what that piece was about underneath wasn’t that I didn’t love Austen—I didn’t love that she had become the novelist of that period, right?

So, the piece begins with me, sort of, joking that I was cranky that people didn’t pay attention to Mary Shelley because she had also written six novels but everyone pays attention to Austen. I was really interested in what I called, “Underread women novelists of the time.” There were also scholars who were thinking about those artists and those novelists.

But really, the narrative around Austen that we—and I have to conclude myself in that—created was what I know now that I was pushing back against. I think that because she’s a woman writer, and women writers are so easily dismissed and the things that women are interested in are often dismissed, it’s all too easy to focus on her as a cultural warrior without thinking about what she offers or doesn’t offer, the questions she asks or doesn’t ask in her work. Because we’re so interested in the hagiography and, kind of, holding her up as a person that we admire, it’s really hard then to say, “But what is she doing here that might not be quote unquote ‘admirable?’” That doesn’t make her a less brilliant writer but maybe someone that we need to step back and understand in the fuller range.

BOGAEV: And what you did in this whole not loving Jane Austen path brought you to the Folger on a fellowship focused on researching the origins of English wealth in the New World sugar plantations and the slave trade because that’s the wealth that underpins all of the wealthy people in her novels. So, what materials were you interested in the archives there?

MATTHEW: So, I started out wanting to learn more about the way that Jamaica is represented in all kinds of texts and documents. The Folger has books, you know, The Laws of Jamaica written by the Privy Council, or representations of Jamaica in encyclopedic text that account for all of the different kinds of flora and fauna of the Caribbean. That was the main focus that I went in with. My book looks at 18th- and 19^th-century literature and literary and visual culture. It compares that to contemporary Black representations of that iconography, and then how Jamaica is represented in texts that would have circulated in England in the 18th and 19th century.

BOGAEV: So, say even in travelogues, which I know the Folger has a lot of—

MATTHEW: —Yes, exactly, travelogues, plays, poems.

I was also interested in—I have a chapter on portraiture and there’s a painting that I was wanting to understand more carefully that has a man, who looks very much like Ira Aldridge, standing next to a young white woman. I saw that in Bristol in England. And so, I wanted to understand how Ira Aldridge looks. And how he looks shifts and changes depending on the objects he’s depicted in. So, he’s different in an engraving than he is in an advertisement, then he is in a frontispiece where he is playing Othello.

And then along the way, I knew that I was interested in mapping and cartography. The John Carter Brown Library purchased a plan of a plantation map in Jamaica that was owned by the godfather of Austen’s brother. The key to the map shows how the land is allotted. So, there are this many acres and they are for grazing, and then there are this many acres for growing different crops. Then there are plots of land that are assigned with names of enslaved people and those are plots of land that were assigned to enslaved people to grow food for themselves and also for the plantation. It’s really rare to have a map that says, “This plot of land is assigned to this person.”

So, I went to the John Carter Brown Library and was able to see it and think about it and I wanted to understand that plantation plan in the context of other kinds of cartography, maps of Jamaica, representations of Jamaican plantations that are really sanitized and used to circulate the propagandic idea that slavery didn’t need to be abolished because it had been ameliorated by less cruel models of life.

What I found at the Folger in, not all, but often I would be looking at a travelogue, or I might be looking at a book like The Laws of Jamaica, and then folded into the pages almost like origami were maps. I was fascinated by them. Then I started—and this is the glory, by the way, of being a long-term fellow—I just had time to, sort of, do a kind of rabbit hole, except you’re in an archive, you’re not on the internet, going down a rabbit hole.

I started pulling, and asking, and looking for different kinds of maps, and then thinking about the way that plots of land are described before we get to a plantation map. So, that was what I spent mostly the last half of my fellowship exploring—why is it significant that we have a person’s name and how are Black people, our enslaved people, represented on other kinds of maps? There’s a Jamaica map with things that say, like, “Negro Valley,” or “Mulatto River”—and trying to understand how those things speak to one another was part of my project there.

BOGAEV: Wow. First of all, thanks for that window into what it’s like to do this kind of work in an archive like the Folger. So, you’d request a book out of the vault and a map would just fall out of it? That must have been an amazing experience.

MATTHEW: Yes, because, you know, I’m reading and some of it’s rather dry and some of it’s very depressing, and then you just see this piece of paper.

One map, I started to unfold it and it became clear that it was much bigger than it looked and one of the conservationists actually had to come out and unfold, you know, pull it out for me because the paper was so fragile. It was massive. I can’t believe that they were able to fold it in so many ways that it stuck in a book that’s not particularly big.

So, then I started—in every book—I started reading the descriptions on the catalog a little more carefully and like, “Oh, if it says map, I want to see where the map is,” and then comparing different maps and different books. Every time I would open a book, I was, you know, looking, before I would even open it. I would look to see if there were pages that were a little bit thicker because that would suggest that there was something folded into the book and it would probably be a map.

BOGAEV: Oh, such exciting detective work. Okay, so you used Austen as a way into this study of Britain’s abolitionist movement and the history of slavery. But getting back to Austen, did this kind of research change your understanding of her work or her place in the canon?

MATTHEW: Yes. There are novels where she’s very explicit. Mansfield Park. I mean the title asks you to think about Lord Mansfield, who’s a figure that looms large in abolitionist politics, for example.

BOGAEV: Right, and readers, of course, now don’t know that Lord Mansfield was someone who passed laws about the slave trade but anyone reading back then would know exactly what Jane Austen was alluding to.

MATTHEW: Right, exactly. And, you know, Sir Thomas has a plantation in the West Indies and Antigua, so that seems like a really explicit connection and you ask those questions.

So, for me, the challenge is what do I do and how do I think about Austen in novels where that’s not explicitly stated? So, I think particularly, for example, like Pride and Prejudice, that whole novel exists in a world that never once nods to the fact that a lot of the wealth, most of the wealth I can say that makes that world possible, is based on the enslavement of people of color, Black people, native Americans. She never talks about it.

She doesn’t really talk about it in Northanger Abbey, even though one of the novelists that she references in Northanger Abbey also wrote about plantation life in the Caribbean. And so, I feel like more than Austen in the canon, for me, it’s more how do I think about Austen and not replicate the cordoning off of certain novels because those questions aren’t as explicit?

That’s often the expectation. So, people who know me—I’m editing an edition of Mansfield Park for Norton Classics—everyone who knew was like, “Yes, that’s Patricia’s novel to edit.” Right? It’s all right there on the surface.

How do I think about that for Pride and Prejudice? I was not nervous about the history. But I really wanted readers to understand that we can’t just pretend that it happens, or it’s in one novel. It’s just not excavated in every novel. And so, I wanted for people to understand that this is what you need to understand about Austen, the writer, regardless of what is explicit in the text. And I didn’t want it to be a footnote. I didn’t want to treat it as if it were something that was an exceptional way to think about Austen.

People actually think about Austen politically all the time. They understand that the French Revolution happened, for example. They understand that as a woman writer, she was taking, making a political statement actually being a woman who told stories. But race and slavery is something different, and I think people have really wanted to keep her apart from that.

BOGAEV: I’m thinking also, anybody listening to this is thinking of Shonda Rhimes and her television series, Bridgeton, and the other ones. How did they fit into this project of reframing Austen’s work?

MATTHEW: Well, my first job is to tell people that Bridgerton is not an Austen adaptation, even people who you think would know better. I remember being interviewed and they were like, “Well, this is an Austen adaptation.” I’m like, “I promise you it’s not.” I think it’s clear that the novelist who wrote Bridgerton—I want to say Julia Quinn, that’s her name—it’s clear that she read Austen and she’s in the Regency period.

BOGAEV: Well, people lump them all together, right?

MATTHEW: People lump them all together, in much the same way that I think, too, a lot of people, if you say that you study 19th-century novels, they say, “Oh, Jane Austen and the Brontes.” And those are different writers writing in a different England, right? Victorian England is very different from Regency England, but we kind of paint over all of that.

I think that the world that Shonda Rhimes, I wouldn’t say she replicates, that she gestures towards, reminds people of what they think they know or imagine about the Regency era. Everyone in the original novels is white. Shonda Rhimes added people of color. Quinn does not, it’s a sparkling, white world. What was interesting to me is that when Shonda Rhimes introduces people of color into a world, she insists in almost every case, they’re either aristocrats or upwardly mobile, which is, I think, Shonda Rhimes’ real milieu.

It really makes us think, “Well, what were Black people like? Were there Black people in England and what were their lives like?” And I think it invites us to go back and look at what the world might have actually been like. I think that Austen fans in particular are fascinating because they actually really want to understand the history. They want to understand the cultural moment that produced these novels. And I think Rhimes invites us to go back and look at that world more closely.

BOGAEV: So, what I hear you saying is that Bridgeton, almost despite itself, helps to change the conversation around race and Regency culture.

MATTHEW: Yes, exactly. Queen Charlotte is a spinoff of Bridgerton and I thought it was the most interesting one.

So, one of the threads of Queen Charlotte is that the queen mother understands that she’s about to bring a woman of color into England, and so, she makes all of these other people of color aristocrats. It’s like it’s the first DEI project in history. “We need more people of color with titles, and so we’ll just…”

It doesn’t work that way and that’s not what happened. Shonda Rhimes tells us this at the beginning, “This is a story. It’s not history.” But I thought, “Wow, that’s a kind of fascinating question that forces us, or pulls us in, I should say, to think about what is the likelihood—and if not in aristocratic circles, where? Where were they and how did they live? And what is the role of slavery and abolition?” I always put those two things together because the abolitionist period is most active at the time that Austen is writing and her contemporaries are writing—her contemporaries, who by the way are very explicit in many of their stories in writing about people of color and slavery.

BOGAEV: You know, some years it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Austen adaptation and there are few looming as we speak: a Netflix miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, and there’s a new movie version of Sense and Sensibility. Why do you think she’s still so popular despite everything we’ve been saying, everything objectionable or not modern about her, her books? And you could list them: The heteronormativity, and reactionary racial politics, and elaborate social propriety and all the rest. I mean, I’ve read Pride and Prejudice I don’t know how many times, so it’s not like I’m not implicated in this but I don’t think I have an answer for it.

MATTHEW: Well, two things. First, I just want to encourage everyone— because I think that there’s a way that people feel, and I had to interrogate this about how we’re, quote unquote, “supposed to feel” about Austen, right? I think that there’s this sense that because she doesn’t perform a politics that we now hold up as ideal, that we’re not supposed to enjoy reading her—and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that. I don’t know that I would call Austen objectionable. And I don’t know—

BOGAEV: —But I don’t think we need this message, you know, a woman needs to go out and find a man.

MATTHEW: Right.

BOGAEV: From ancient times, you know?

MATTHEW: Exactly. And, you know, as I say, I think in one part of the introduction, there’s no way in which Austen is radical. She’s upholding a very conservative, patriarchal, heteronormative world—and just as a side note, for those reasons I had complicated feelings about editing because I thought, “Are these the texts that I want to uphold?” Right?

I’ve spent my career looking at underread novels and novelists who are underread in some part, because they’re talking about issues that England found inconvenient, not in its own time, but in the period that follows. It’s the Victorians. Let’s just blame them for sort of ignoring novels by women in particular. And with, you know, the limited time I have, “Is this the best use of my time and energy?” And I thought it was. Obviously, I said, “Yes.”

I also felt like I could say in a way that was inviting and opening and engaging let’s look at Austen and think about not just slavery and abolition in Northanger Abbey. For example, one of the short essays is about the servants in the novels that don’t often have a voice. So that is, I don’t know if it’s a defense of Austen, but it is a sense that we can take her on her own terms.

But I think it’s fascinating that across cultures and across society, a lot of different kinds of people have picked up these stories and made them their own and done it really well. I think that Fire Island, for example, that queer adaptation that was I think on Hulu, is a really smart, vibrant, creative, engaging take on Austen that looks at queer culture.

I think it’s always a funny thing—as somebody who doesn’t want my students to be limited by things that they can quote-unquote, “relate to.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be relatable for us to read it in class—but I think Austen is relatable to a lot of different kinds of people. I think it’s very easy for Southern Black people to write stories about Austen or Austen-esque stories. Nikki Payne has written two Austen adaptations. Creators keep going back because there’s just so much that you can do with the framework that she offers, even I think in some ways undermining it and making fun of it.

BOGAEV: Well, it’s interesting because I was thinking about why are we talking about Austen on our Shakespeare podcast? And I was thinking there’s a lot of similarities between the two when you get down to it.

Austen is taught pretty ubiquitously. I mean, we share this common knowledge of Jane Austen in the same way that we share a kind of global knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays. And so, it’s this commonality that we have. There’s some very universal themes and maybe archetypal characters. She exposes hypocrisy in a really enticing way, and there’s sexiness and fun—I mean, she encompasses a lot in her work, in somewhat similar ways as Shakespeare, and I’m just curious what connections you see between them that help explain this enduring fascination or preoccupation with her?

MATTHEW: You know, I think you’re right about all of that and I think there’s also something to be said about the comfort of generic expectations.

I always say when I start my Austen class that, “Just like you know that you’re in a Shakespeare comedy because Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, you understand that you’re in a courtship novel because courtship novels end in marriage.” Within the structures of genre, both Austen and Shakespeare have a lot of fun, and there’s something comforting and understanding that the genre that you’re in is going to produce a certain conclusion. That’s why we reread both of them. Once you understand what’s going to happen, then you get to go back and really enjoy the way that these writers tell us that those things happen.

BOGAEV: Yeah. I think what I look at, for instance, Mansfield Park, it almost feels like a Shakespearean-problem play ending, like All’s Well, to me.

MATTHEW: Yeah, I think so. I think that when Austen says at the end that she’ll leave to other pens—

BOGAEV: Yes!

MATTHEW: —to explain, you know, this. And what she’s really saying is, “I understand that I’m at the end”—and at the end there’s a play, by the way, and we might remember the lover’s vows in Mansfield Park. At the end when she says, “I’ll leave it to other pens,” it’s almost as if she’s saying, “I understand that we have these generic expectations that we’re supposed to work our way through and I’ve done the work that I’m going to do with this story and I’ve solved the problem, even though the solution might leave some of us wanting.”

BOGAEV: Well, one of the things we haven’t talked about is Jane Austen’s style. She’s been called strikingly modern in her writing techniques. So, can you talk more about that?

MATTHEW: So, one of the things that I do say in the introduction is that Austen’s narrators don’t just tell us the story. They don’t just relate the events that happen. They actually have opinions about the characters that Austen introduces over the course of the novel and the way that people engage in the world.

So, we know that we’re supposed to make fun of Mr. Collins because of the way the narrator describes him and the parts of him that we see in his speeches and in his letters. And that feels a little more modern than simply recounting the things that happen or the events that happen over the course of the story.

BOGAEV: And that’s a lot of the fun of reading Jane Austen because she’s so, I don’t want to say snarky, but she’s kind of snarky.

MATTHEW: Yes, her narrators certainly are! And I think that one of the reasons, maybe for some people that she comes across in some ways as a more radical than she actually is, is because no one is spared from her critique.

BOGAEV: Yes. You’ve been digging into Austen’s life, too. I think it’s fair to say that many people assume from her novels that her life was this sheltered one, provincial and quiet. How does that square with the facts though?

MATTHEW: I think, through her reading especially, I think she was more widely read than anyone might originally think and her brother writes this in the biographical notice that precedes Northanger Abbey. He says, you know, that, “She lived a quiet life” but he’s very proud and the family’s very proud, both of how much she read and how early she began writing and playing with history and stories about women and propriety.

So, while she didn’t travel a lot, she enjoyed the travel that she did engage in. She loved being in London, for example. And she was really an intellectually, and I think that’s really important to understand, she was an intellectually curious reader who didn’t just take everything in uncritically just because it was published in a book. And you see this a lot in Northanger Abbey. It’s a novel about not just novel reading, which is what gets picked up the most because of its satirizing of gothic fiction, but it is a novel about how children learn and what they learn through reading.

BOGAEV: Oh yeah, there are pages and pages of discourse between her and her love interest about the purpose of reading—in fact, it’s a book about mansplaining, it seems to me.

MATTHEW: Yes.

BOGAEV: I mean, this guy the main character is in love with, is such a mansplainer.

MATTHEW: Yes, he really is and is rather smug. I guess that’s what mansplaining is at its core, right? It’s kind of smug.

BOGAEV: Right? Smug declaiming.

MATTHEW: But this goes back to the narrator not just telling the story. So, as you know, in Northanger Abbey, there’s that very famous defense of the novel in the middle of telling the story.

BOGAEV: Because at the time it was thought that, or some people thought that, novels were mainly read by women and they were corrupting, right? That was the controversy.

MATTHEW: Yes, and so, the genre that England valorized was poetry and particularly poetry by men. Novels were considered dangerous, mostly because they excited the imagination and encouraged fantasy. It was not considered the best use of any person, but particularly a young woman’s time.

There’s a great deal of anxiety about novel reading when Austen is writing. And even before, this is why Frances Burney—whose novel inspires the title of Pride and Prejudice—this is why for her first novels, she doesn’t even call herself a novelist. She considers herself a quote unquote, “Editor,” who’s editing the letters of a young woman that the young woman writes to her guardian. And so even the idea of the novel with chapters and characters that are very carefully delineated is something that was considered dangerous at a time when you really were supposed to be reading moral text or poetry.

BOGAEV: I’m thinking Mark Twain famously hated Austen, right? He said a lot of, kind of, more violent things than this but one of the things he said was that, “Just the omission of her books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”

But now that you’ve done so much work digging into the culture of her day and economy and the politics of the slave trade, does Austen’s world irritate you less?

MATTHEW: Oh, that’s actually a good question. Does Austen’s world irritate me less? I feel a little implicated in my attachment to some of Regency era culture. And I think that the complicated relationship we have with Austen in that period is that there are parts of it that we like, that we have come to like.

I think the reason that we have people who dress up like Austen characters or who care about what kind of punch was served or what happens at tea—I think that there is something very appealing in the way that so much of America is Anglophilic. It’s a love affair with England. We all woke up to watch Meghan Markle get married. And maybe this is what I’m sort of getting towards in I think a very legitimate critique of what Austen holds up in her novels: patriarchal cultures, heteronormativity, ignoring the plight of the working class, ignoring the plight of enslaved people that she would have known about.

I think at the same time, escapism is a real impulse. I think I’m more sympathetic to that now than I was when I was a graduate student, for example, when it was very, very fashionable to dismiss Austen for all of the reasons that you say. I think we read her, or a lot of us read her—Edward Said very famously talks about the dead silence in Mansfield Park. He gets some things wrong, but he still gets a lot right that we have to think about. In an essay that I wrote called Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn, I talk about a moment when I taught Austen in a class, a graduate seminar, and I watched the class split itself—half of the women were middle-class white women who looked exactly like you imagine an Austen fan would look, and the other half, I teach at a diverse university, so, they were queer, here were people of color—and the way that those two different groups read Austen was fascinating to me as an instructor. One of them was asking the very questions you are, challenging the kind of world that she holds up as an ideal. And some, not all, but some of the white women thought of themselves as Elizabeth Bennett and they were really not sure by the end of class what to do with their fascination with that world.

I think escapism is actually real and that our pleasures are always complicated, and so, I’m perfectly fine understanding that part of that world feels appealing. You live in that for a little while, and then the real world is also right there.

BOGAEV: It sounds like you did your job with that class. I am so glad you could take the time to talk today. Thank you. It’s been a delight and so interesting.

MATTHEW: Thank you so much for the opportunity. This is the first time I’ve processed doing these additions in real time, so I’m really grateful for the chance to think out loud about the work I tried to do.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Patricia Matthew, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Penguin Classics Deluxe editions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, edited and with introductions by Matthew, come out in September and are available for pre-order now.

Her forthcoming edition of Mansfield Park, on the Norton Library imprint, is also available for pre-order and will publish early next year.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Digital Island Studios in New York and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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