JANE AUSTEN HAS ALT-RIGHT ADMIRERS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that anyone in want of attention could do worse than take possession of Jane Austen. We’ve already had Austen and zombies, Austen and game theory, Austen and guinea pigs. Now, a scholar has offered another spit-take-inducing pairing: Jane Austen and the alt-right. In an article published March 12 in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Alt-Right Jane Austen (and illustrated with a drawing of the beloved novelist in a Make America Great Again hat), Nicole M. Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, describes finding a surprising Austen fan base. It started, she writes, when she noticed the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos riffing on the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice, turning it into a dig at “ugly” feminists. “By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen,” she writes, alt-right Austen fans “nudge readers” into thinking that “perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks.”