Monday 29th September 2025

Venue: Online

7pm BST

Chawton House’s digital living room reopens for the Autumn/Winter season with the first of a series of digital events for our Jane Austen Book Club.

Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

Devoney Looser

You may have thought Jane Austen was a quiet spinster, but Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest. Tracing the author’s life and legacy across 250 years, she reveals an Austen far wilder than the one we know.

Looser takes a deep dive into Austen’s work, offering fresh insights into her six completed novels, as well as her juvenilia, unfinished fiction, essays, and poetry. She also reveals new information about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. Examining the author’s legacy, she turns up extraordinary stories about ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in court, and the eclectic members of the Austen family, whose own outrageous lives are wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth and humour, and filled with remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to one of the world’s most beloved novelists.

Credit: Marilyn Roos

About the Author:

Devoney Looser is the author or editor of ten books, including The Making of Jane Austen (2017), a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and a Guggenheim Fellow, a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She plays roller derby as ‘Stone Cold Jane Austen’.

Tickets: £6 | £50 season ticket to all JABC events onsite and online. For the full list, click here.

This is an online event. It takes place 7-8pm BST. The cut off to purchase tickets is midnight on the day before the event. The Zoom link should be visible on your ticket, but ticket holders will be also emailed the Zoom link on the day of the event. If you do not receive joining details by midday (UK time) on the day of the event, please email info@chawtonhouse.org with your order number. The talks will be recorded and emailed out to those who cannot join synchronously within 7 days. Access to working internet is required. Please note this event will take place live.

What is the Jane Austen Book Club?

Jane Austen’s anniversary year has seen multiple books about her life and work published. Over the Autumn and Winter of 2025, we speak to some of the authors working on Austen—novelists, biographers, and graphic artists—about their love of Austen, the inspiration behind their work, and the fresh perspectives they bring to her world. Each session offers the chance to hear lively conversation, ask questions, and explore how Austen continues to spark joy and creativity today.