Novelist Austen’s brother linked with move to end slavery, professor finds

A US scholar has discovered that Pride And Prejudice author Jane Austen’s favourite brother had a link to the 19th-century abolition movement.

The discovery by Professor Devoney Looser is a marked contrast to an Austen family link to slavery which emerged 50 years ago.

The Arizona State University professor and author of The Making Of Jane Austen found evidence of the Rev Henry Thomas Austen’s attendance at the 1840 World Antislavery Convention in London, which drew some 500 delegates.

“I was stunned to find that fact,” Prof Looser said in an interview.

She first detailed her research in an essay for The Times Literary Supplement.

“The family’s commitments and actions changed profoundly, from known complicity in colonial slavery to previously unnoticed antislavery activism,” Prof Looser wrote.

“Henry became a next-generation Austen publicly supporting a political commitment to abolish slavery across the globe.”

Prof Looser’s essay also addresses patriarch George Austen’s previously revealed ties to another family’s West Indian sugar plantation, calling them “very real”, but “both under-described and overstated”.

The latest research was welcomed by Patricia A Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey who focuses on literature of the period that encompasses Austen.

Her courses also include British abolitionist literature.

“I’m always excited about new information about the authors I teach,” Prof Matthew said.

While it does not change her view of Austen’s work –“I don’t believe that I’m reading someone who’s actively engaged in debates about the slave trade” – it could resound with Austen’s most devoted admirers, sometimes called Jane-ites.

“I think they are having a kind of reckoning in how they think about not just Austen, but the Regency period,” said Prof Matthew, referring to the British era of the early 1800s.

“It raises all manner of interesting questions about how they understand this author.”

The slim collection of novels that Jane Austen wrote before her death aged 41 in July 1817 focus on relationships, not current events.

There is a glancing reference to slavery in Mansfield Park, and a character in Emma defends an off-stage figure as “rather a friend to the abolition”.