More than 200 years after her demise, Jane Austen's views on slavery stay unclear. Jim Dyson/Getty Images
More than two centuries after Jane Austen died in 1817, lots of the English novelist’s followers need to know her takes on her day’s massive points, together with race, colonialism and slavery.
Vigorous debates proceed about what she could have thought, however her household’s engagement within the motion to abolish slavery is step by step coming to gentle.
After scouring Nineteenth-century newspapers and archives for brand spanking new info, I’ve found that three of Austen’s brothers publicly participated within the abolition motion within the years after her demise.
The efforts of one among her brothers, which I unearthed from historic data, are described right here for the primary time and will likely be included in my forthcoming ebook, “Wild for Austen,” in 2025.
Race and slavery in Austen’s novels
Many readers suspect Austen was important of colonial slavery’s violence and hurt, however there’s no consensus on this query. Austen, the writer of “Pride and Prejudice” and different traditional novels, contains the phrases “slave” and “slavery” in her fiction on almost a dozen events.
Her final unfinished novel, “Sanditon,” contains a mixed-race character named Miss Lambe. She is described as a “half mulatto” heiress from the West Indies.
Timid heroine Fanny Price of “Mansfield Park” asks her imperious uncle Sir Thomas Bertram – who’s himself an enslaver – a query in regards to the slave commerce. Readers aren’t advised how he solutions, simply that she drops the topic when his response meets with “such a lifeless silence” from her incurious cousins.
In “Emma,” penniless Jane Fairfax controversially compares being employed as a governess with the miseries of the slave commerce. She calls each enslaved folks and governesses “victims.”
Experts disagree about whether or not these examples present Austen’s tacit acceptance or implied criticism of slavery.
Great Britain and colonial slavery
Starting within the 1660s, Great Britain brutally transported about 3.4 million Africans to be enslaved within the Americas – with about half one million dying through the harrowing journey referred to as the Middle Passage. Many of those enslaved folks ended up in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, known as the West Indies.
Decades of campaigning by 18th-century abolitionists led to the slave commerce’s ban within the British Empire in 1807.
The slave commerce’s brutality was embedded within the design of the ships used for the depressing journey from Africa to the Americas referred to as the Middle Passage.
Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade through Wikimedia Commons
It took greater than 20 years of additional activism earlier than Parliament abolished slavery in most British colonies in 1833. This was greater than three many years earlier than the United States adopted go well with.
Although Austen died earlier than abolition, the antislavery motion was at full tilt throughout her lifetime. Her writings provide few clues about her political opinions, however one surviving letter mentions her love for writer and famous abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.
Still, there’s no proof she overtly contributed to the work of his campaigns or different antislavery societies.
Profits from slavery
Some of Austen’s family members had direct financial ties to slavery.
One was her aunt Jane Leigh Perrot, born into an prosperous household of enslavers in Barbados. That aunt had married the rich brother of Jane Austen’s mom. The Leigh Perrots stood to inherit a share of her late father’s plantation. Their mixed fortune was finally bequeathed to descendants of James Austen-Leigh, Jane’s eldest brother, who added the surname Leigh in 1837.
There had been different Austen household connections to enslavers.
Until 2021, many students believed Rev. George Austen, Jane Austen’s father, stood to learn financially from the Antigua plantation of his former Oxford pupil, James Langford Nibbs. Rev. Austen was mentioned to have been that plantation’s trustee, however there have been vital misunderstandings about his purported position.
Rev. Austen was truly a co-trustee to Nibbs’ 1760 marriage settlement, having simply served because the clergyman who married Nibbs and his spouse, as I found. Rev. Austen’s uncompensated co-trusteeship “would by no means have concerned him in any duties related with working a plantation,” as authorized scholar John Avery Jones has argued.
Research on connections between the Austen household and slavery proceeds.
3 abolitionist brothers
What’s come to gentle, via my ongoing analysis, is that three of Jane’s six brothers later grew to become publicly concerned within the abolition motion.
One of them was Capt. Charles John Austen. He policed the unlawful slave commerce within the West Indies within the Royal Navy. He wrote a letter to an English newspaper about his August 1826 seize of a slave ship and shared his observations in regards to the horrific circumstances endured by enslaved folks on board. His actions, nonetheless, allowed the slaver to flee, as I discovered by analyzing lengthy missed authorities paperwork.
More distinguished was the abolitionist work of Jane’s brother Henry Thomas Austen, a failed banker turned clergyman. He served as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, as I first reported in 2021. This truth hadn’t been seen earlier than, apparently as a result of Henry was then utilizing the identify Rev. H. T. Austen. Previous students hadn’t realized he was Jane’s brother.
To this increasing Austen household abolitionist historical past we could now add a 3rd Austen brother, Francis “Frank” William Austen.
It has lengthy been identified that Frank, a naval officer, privately expressed abolitionist views. What my new analysis has uncovered is that he labored overtly as a neighborhood antislavery activist after Jane’s 1817 demise however earlier than the British authorities handed the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
That makes Frank the earliest identified antislavery activist in Jane Austen’s speedy household.
The Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade & for the Civilization of Africa, a British abolitionist group, held a conference in June 1840.
S. Blunt drawing engraved by J. Harris through Wellcome Collection
A movement to finish slavery
A brief announcement within the Hampshire Chronicle on Feb. 6, 1826, relays: “The Magistrates at Gosport, in compliance with the requisition of many inhabitants, have appointed a gathering for Friday subsequent, to contemplate the propriety of petitioning Parliament for the Abolition of Slavery within the West India Colonies.”
Frank Austen took a management position there, a beforehand unnoticed truth. At that assembly, “a petition to the House of Commons, praying the abolition of slavery within the West India Colonies, was agreed to.” Capt. Austen of the Royal Navy – Frank Austen – made the movement for the petition’s approval, which then handed.
The abolitionist work within the coastal city of Gosport was a part of a nationwide motion. Many cities submitted petitions to an inattentive Parliament. In close by Portsmouth, a 66-foot-long petition signed by 3,187 folks had been despatched, “praying for the abolition of negro slavery within the West Indies,” in keeping with one other dispatch within the Hampshire Chronicle.
“Praying” right here means “requesting,” though there was a religious component concerned. Prominent members of the British clergy in Bath took a number one position in getting ready the petition there. In Gosport, nonetheless, the antislavery motion got here from Frank Austen, together with a solicitor, a surgeon, a grocer and a baker.
The decision Frank Austen moved to just accept known as slavery “repugnant.” It demanded “measures … most conducive to the speedy Amelioration of the situation of the Slave inhabitants, in addition to the gradual however whole extinction of Slavery,” in keeping with a report within the Hampshire Telegraph on Feb. 13, 1826.
More to be taught
The Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, England, just lately ran an exhibit about Frank Austen, who was born 250 years in the past, in 1774. There’s extra to be taught not solely about Jane Austen’s personal views of slavery however about Frank Austen himself.
That museum additionally introduced its acquisition of Frank’s unpublished memoir and sketchbook, for which it sought crowd-sourced transcription. Once it’s publicly shared, the memoir may forged additional gentle on his beliefs.
In the meantime, students proceed to hunt new information, to take a position about what Jane Austen’s fiction says between the traces and to research what she could have believed about slavery and abolition. This is going on forward of the 250th anniversary of her start on Dec. 16, 2025.
Taken collectively, these discoveries in regards to the abolitionist activism of three of Jane Austen’s six brothers add weight to the idea that by the tip of her life, minimize quick by sickness at age 41, the novelist could herself have been on the highway to turning into a passionate, lively and public supporter of abolition.
Devoney Looser has acquired analysis funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a life member and former member of the board of administrators of the nonprofit Jane Austen Society of North America. The analysis talked about on this article will seem in her forthcoming ebook, "Wild for Austen" (St. Martin's Press, 2025).