Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist
Time to talk all things Austen with author Janet Lewis Saidi (aka Substack's Plain Jane of The Austen Connection)
“Jane Austen is hot, and she’ll always be hot”
Something a little different and rather exciting to share today.
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that I’ve been reading and writing about Jane Austen—a lot. When I returned to writing on Substack in January, I had no idea this was the turn my year and my words were going to take. I came back, as I’d left in 2023, ready to talk books and films and interconnections and rabbit holes—and then a newsletter from The Austen Connection appeared in my inbox that shifted the course of my year.
I wrote about it here—I am, it transpires, a woman helpless to the call of a readalong of all six of Austen’s novels to celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth. Nearly ten months later, five books read together, and much Austen-based thought and adoration exchanged, I am a woman with zero regrets who is delighted to share with you an interview with the genius behind The Austen Connection, Plain Jane aka Janet Lewis Saidi.
Janet not only writes and co-ordinates incredible weekly essays providing the Great Austen Readalong gang with insightful analysis and thought-provoking connections, but she has also written a book, Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist, released in the US last month and published in the UK today!
The book, like Janet herself, is brimming with Austen knowledge shared in an engaging way—and it came about because of the presence and conversation she’s fostered on Substack. These are the stories we want to read. And this is story I asked Janet to share with me, as we sat down together in Yorkshire and Missouri to spill the tea.
Enjoy! (We certainly did.)
Claire: Hi Janet! Here on Substack you are known for The Austen Connection—can you tell us more about how you became a Jane Austen enthusiast, why you started your Substack and how it’s developed over the years?
Janet: I was an English Major and also did a Masters in English, and I’ve always been a huge book nerd, but never really focused on Jane Austen. I was in London in the 90s—which sounds way cooler than it felt at the time—and really into Virginia Woolf and also Gertrude Stein and all the expat lesbians that I love to point out published Ulysses, which launched us into the contemporary literature! And I was really into that kind of experimental, very feminist and LGBT literature in London.
I came to Jane Austen later—I think Jane Austen always seems like a comfort read. During lockdown, I was doing a talk show for my day job [Janet is a public radio producer]. We were live daily, and basically the whole idea was that this is what our station can offer right now—a place and people and community to check-in in real time. And I started reading Jane Austen to get away from the news.
I have a friend who’s a real rock star, Devoney Looser, who I’ve talked to for years about public engagement and literature. I would look at what she was doing—she spent a decade working on her book, Sister Novelists—and felt like public radio and the dialogue in the community is the thing for me, I cannot spend a decade in libraries. But Devoney also wants to turn literature into dialogue and conversation, so we would kind of meet in the middle.
She sent me a link to a Jane Austen & Co Zoom about ‘Black Lives of the Regency’ with Gretchen Gerzina. And it had hundreds of people on it. And I realised, here we are talking about history, race and power, which I’m talking about in my day job, and here we are talking about it in relation to the literature we read and the stories that we tell. And Jane Austen.
I felt like this made sense for me to do something with on a more formal platform—the dialogue and community aspects through literature, and as a huge book nerd, I felt like this is where my worlds can come together. But not publicly or officially, my worlds are going to come together in a very extracurricular way—I’m going to do this as a Substack on the weekends. I was too shy to do it as Janet Saidi, so I started it anonymously.
But the other thing was that I’ve always been a huge writer. I write fiction, I write all the time, and so The Austen Connection provided a structure for writing. People are surprised by that, they think I launched a podcast because I had access to microphones and a studio, but the podcast element was to help the engagement—what I really wanted to do was write. During lockdown it felt like this is what will make me happy and actually keep me sane right now—I’ll do this for myself, but I also might be able to contribute something through this conversation. And five years later, in the world we’re in, those kinds of dialogue and connections now seem absolutely essential.
Claire: You are celebrating this year’s 250th Austen anniversary in two exciting ways—with the publication of your book (which we’ll get onto in a minute), but also by hosting a readalong of the six main Austen novels across the whole year. How have you found the readalong and have you been surprised by anything or seen something in a new light through reading and discussing the novels with a large group?
Janet: I did it really as a chance of surviving a busy year! I was writing big essays a couple of times a month, which I loved. But I knew with my teaching day job and producing day job and a book launch it would be a lot. And with the book, I was surprised that the publishers actually said in the contract a certain amount of the Substack can go into the book, and a certain amount of the book can go into the Substack. They’re very happy for the two to speak to each other, but there is a percentage, like 10% both ways.
So I thought a way to keep it very Substack exclusive was to have a readalong, and I also thought that will be manageable. I need to read the books anyway. So let me read the books, take notes and publish my notes. Maybe some people will come along with me.
I was shocked from the very beginning. There’s a post Happy everything!, which is just joyfully saying it’s the new year and we’re going to read along together. I was very hesitant to even publish that post to say ‘yes, we are doing this’. I did do quite a bit of front-end producing, but I wondered if by September 2025 it would still make sense!
So it was about me reading, and seeing if some friends and community would read along with me, without putting off the audience that were enjoying The Austen Connection essays and conversation. A surprising number that were just planning to enjoy the conversation, have actually found themselves reading.
And I’ve been shocked by the number of people who immediately were into a readalong. I believe it’s a Substack thing! It’s definitely not a zero sum game on Substack. Quite the opposite. Simon Haisell, who’s like the godfather of readalongs, highlighted my readalong, which brought a lot of people. There’s a real readalong energy on Substack, which I think feeds on itself and becomes stronger and more of a thing as it goes.
And it’s wonderful. There are entire brilliant essays in our comment section. And we’re talking about real things, difficult topics. When we were discussing Mansfield Park, not everyone’s going to feel the same at the same time about the issues that are in the background of this novel. In facilitating the comments I do draw from hosting a public radio talk show, because you never know, someone can come on and have objectionable views, or even someone just trying to understand something but managing to offend people, that can be really tough. But as a producer, you know that your job is to open up the airwaves, let people have their say, let people have their voice.
Claire: Onto your book! Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist was published last month in the US and publishes today (23rd October 2025) here in the UK. I know you’ve mentioned that it was thanks to your Substack that this wonderful book came into existence, can you tell us more about how it came about?
Janet: Yes, it was super exciting! It was because it’s the 250th year of Jane Austen and I had been writing publicly and convening conversation about Jane Austen. I had thought it would be really cool to do a book, and I thought I’d missed the boat because I had a lot of stuff going on with work. I had stepped in as a news director for a year. And it was all I could do, that and the Substack for fun on my Saturdays. I just wasn’t able to work towards a book deal.
Then suddenly, I had this email in my inbox from an acquiring editor at Simon & Schuster, who was amazing, and who knew The Austen Connection and said “we are wanting to do a 250th celebration edition,” and what they were wanting seemed to go really well with The Austen Connection. And so I ended up with a book deal!
It’s funny, because there are two ways to talk about getting a book deal, and one is the Jane Austen way. The way I just gave you is kind of the Jane Austen way: Oh, I’ve been writing for myself, and entertaining my (Substack) family, and sitting with my cup of tea—and lo and behold, a publisher appears and publishes my work.
The fact is, as I’ve already said I really wanted to be a writer, I have that ambition, and I had always hoped that the Substack might lead to a book. I had actually acquired a wonderful agent named Andy Ross, who’s incredible, and he and also a colleague, who’s an investigative journalist, they were not big Jane Austen people, but both said The Austen Connection was really cool. “Jane Austen is hot,” is literally what my agent said, “and she’ll always be hot. There’s no rush.” So he was already working with me when Simon & Schuster came calling.
So that was kind of the way it happened. But I want to say, like Jane Austen, I did want to be published. I did want to write a book. And I did want to be paid for it. Jane Austen also did all of these things.
Claire: The book is structured in vignettes, which I love! With someone as well-known and well-loved as Austen, how did you decide which information you wanted to share and the particular Austen journey you wanted to take your readers on?
Janet: One hundred, two-page vignettes is the Pocket Portraits series structure—let me give a shout-out to Simon & Schuster’s Adams Media editors, Sarah Doughty and Colleen Mulhern, they came up with this.
So believe it or not, as wonderful as it is to get an email saying you might be the person to write this really cool celebration edition of Jane Austen that we want to do, I spent weeks thinking about it, because in some ways I didn’t know if I was the right writer. But the 100 vignettes really allowed me to think in terms of themes, which is very similar to what I’m doing with The Austen Connection.
And the acquiring editor, Colleen Mulhern, pointed out that my NPR (National Public Radio) writing experience worked for me too. Basically, each vignette is like a talk show intro. For example, I’ve got to write about the theme of friendship in Jane Austen’s novels, maybe Emma and Harriet, and I’ve got four paragraphs to do this—so it was a comfortable format for me.
I got up in the middle of the night, and I just wrote down themes, like friendship, terrible marriages, parents, class, flirting at a ball. And I think I had 75, it wasn’t that difficult to do. In the end, it was hard to fit everything in, but they really wanted the adaptations. I knew I was with the right people when the acquiring editor brought up the hand flex! How often are you going to have an editor who wants the life of Jane Austen and her philosophies and her world, and also the romance tropes and the hand flex, the memes, all of it as part of the life of Jane Austen!
It was important to me to show the stories from Jane’s life connecting the dots to the stories she told. Here’s a young woman writing courtship plots, and her intrepid, brilliant, wonderful sister that she looks up to, gets engaged, so happily engaged, to someone who seems worthy and they’re close to the family, and then he dies of fever at sea. The impact that must have had to have a front row seat to that, but also just to have that loss in your life. And her sister never marrying. So yes, that is something that we can do as Substackers and writers that the scholars aren’t always as comfortable doing, we can connect the dots.
My fellow Janeite, Damianne Scott, who runs the Facebook page Black Girl Loves Jane, says we put Jane Austen on a pedestal, and that’s also a problem. She lives and breathes among us, through her stories. And so we can interpret them, and we can enjoy them, and we can talk about them, and we can adapt them for our times, which I think is very empowering as well.
One thing that I love doing with The Austen Connection, and that probably comes out in the book, is highlighting the ‘unexpected’ Jane Austen. So many of our women writers we see as sitting quietly, living a very orderly life to be able to write. And they did have to have a certain amount of stability and privilege to be the ones picking up the pen (which is why I think it’s so important to read diverse readings alongside).
But Jane Austen experienced a lot of instability and some financial insecurity. There were challenges. And I think those of us who’ve had those challenges in life feel like there’s a shame surrounding them, and if we know that our iconic writers were able to do this, tell these stories, and these stories we enjoy also come from a position of some insecurity and instability—that’s really important to bring out.
I’m not trying to highlight things that nobody’s highlighted before or cause a ruckus by saying Jane Austen probably didn’t love Bath and was going from place to place and perhaps wasn’t feeling the stability of home at that time. I’m not doing it just to be interesting. I’m doing it because I think it’s very empowering to the people who connect with her stories to know that she experienced some things that she would have found shameful to advertise, and that we also find shameful to advertise, but that’s also there in these stories that always end with a really great piece of real estate! That’s not coming from someone who had everything, that’s coming from someone who understood all kinds of deprivation and desire. I think those are two really good words around Jane Austen—deprivation and desire.
Claire: How long did it take you for you to put the book together?
It was a pretty tight timeline. We wanted it to come out for the 250th anniversary, and for the December birthday. I basically wrote it last year during the Holidays. I was away from teaching, and I was writing two vignettes a day. We went into the spring, I think, it was February or March when I finally got it in, and that was with some revisions.
While I was writing along the themes, the editor at Simon & Schuster suggested making it more biographical. So that was the basis of the revisions, which I liked. I think they were good revisions, though it was a little bit more of a challenge for me, honestly, because I was way more interested in the themes of Austen and how they relate to us today, than I was her actual life.
And so I found myself really diving into Austen’s life. Luckily, I had already read the letters all the way through, so I had Deidre Le Faye’s amazing brick of a letter collection and all of her notes and research. And it turns out the other amazing source for Jane Austen is also Deidre Le Faye, A Family Record. So I really didn’t want to stray too far from that with her life. I really wanted to keep it to the basics, but where they intersect with the books. So time forced a concentration of that in a good way, to combine the themes with her life.
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Claire: You’ve included many references to and quotes from each of Austen’s works in your book and obviously have been dissecting them in great detail for your weekly posts on Substack too—so, the million-dollar question, which is your favourite and least favourite of her novels and why?
I think my favourite is Austen’s least favourite heroine—I do love Emma. It might just be because it’s the first one I ever read, but it’s funny and it’s light hearted, and also has that social commentary. I feel like it’s all the best of Austen.
Of course, Persuasion is absolutely gorgeous, and every true Austen lover’s favourite in a way. But I won’t claim it. I’ll leave it to the other experts to love Persuasion. I will say, in some ways, Persuasion is my least favourite, because it’s so sad. I actually avoided Persuasion for a long time. I’d read it, but I didn’t reread it because I was afraid of that pining and sadness, that’s not as much fun.
Jane Austen is always presenting desire, deprivation, pining, difficulties, social commentary, all of these important things within a joyful, funny romance plot, but Persuasion is leaning more into the profound sadness. But of course, it’s brilliant. I’m a big Proust fan, and I feel like you wouldn’t have Proust without this meditation on time that is Persuasion.
It’s fun to think what was Jane Austen’s favourite. When you read the family lore (researching for the book, you realise so much of what we think Jane Austen might have said is coming from nieces and nephews remembering, so you have to refer to it as family lore) I think people can be assured, if you relate to Fanny Price, if you relate to Marianne or Elinor, everybody relates to Anne Elliot I’m sure, or if you are bold enough to admit that you relate to Emma, whoever you relate to, I think Jane Austen related to all of her heroines. I think she’s in every heroine, and I think she’s probably also in just about every hero. She’s almost certainly in Knightley. She’s also probably a little bit in Miss Bates even, maybe not so much, but certainly in Jane Fairfax.
So you know when you’re reading that whatever you’re cringing at and thinking ‘Oh, that’s probably a little bit me’, Jane Austen’s doing the same thing. There’s a little bit of herself in all of it—which is wonderful, I think.
Claire: And I can’t not mention the adaptations. To many Austen fans (and I think that includes both of us), they are such an important part of the canon—telling, retelling, modernising and reimagining these much-loved stories in so many different ways—so again, do you have a favourite and least favourite?
Janet: Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room, Pride and Prejudice. I’m absolutely bipartisan on 1995 and 2005. I just love them both, they’re doing very different things. The series is able to really replicate the novel, and the movie, because it’s got an hour and a half of air time, is able to just take a vision of what this story could be—the emo version!
But I think my favourite, not really with a critical hat on particularly, I just adore all of the Emma adaptations. I don’t know why there’s so many good ones! There’s the Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong 1996 version that Andrew Davies had a hand in. Then the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow, Emma. Then just about a decade later, you’ve got the Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller BBC series, that is lovely—the whole thing is just soft focus and luscious.
But then I think my absolute favourite is the 2020, Emma. If you want to raise your dopamine levels, just watch Johnny Flynn as a musician—his voice and his incredible songwriting ability. And then watch the 2020 Emma and you will hear Knightley, basically, is singing. His voice is so resonant and powerful throughout that adaptation. I think that’s the star of the adaptation! But also you’ve got Josh O’Connor, and Anya Taylor Joy is so quirky and wonderful as Emma in Autumn de Wilde’s vision. Mia Goth is wonderful, and she’s in the hot Frankenstein coming up.
I’m going to answer your least favourite question with another favourite instead, which is the Sense and Sensibility on the Hallmark Channel. I had the honour and pleasure of talking with the director Tia Smith in a JASNA New York conversation called ‘Everybody’s Jane Austen’. That is a beautiful Sense and Sensibility, and you’re up against Ang Lee when you’re talking about Sense and Sensibility, but I actually think that one really rivals it, just for pure joy.
Claire: And finally, one of my favourite things about your book and of course your Substack is the way that you connect Austen (the clue is in the newsletter title!) to contemporary novels and films—and through those connections explore themes that are timeless and universal. So while I’m sure you’ve been knee-deep in bonnets and reticules for most of the year, could you leave us with a recommendation of a film and a book that you’ve enjoyed recently?
Janet: I recently read for the first time, Bonjour Tristesse. I think because you and Kate Jones talked about it on Substack—I loved it, devoured it. I don’t think I can find an Austen connection there. You might be able to find one, Claire!
Can I do a TV series? I absolutely adored Too Much (Netflix). It has Austen connections and having spent the 90s in London, I recognise a lot of the cross-cultural and class aspects. I never felt class so acutely until I lived in London. It has possibly one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen. It’s just lovely.
I think a lot of the critics don’t know what to do with an actual courtship plot and a happily-ever-after. However, as Austen fans and Janeites, we do not have that problem. We know that you can have a happily-ever-after and a courtship plot and still be doing some serious work. I do find the critics a lot of times, even super smart ones, talk about shows like Too Much and films like Materialists and apply them to real life. My students said of Too Much, “those two should not be getting married. They should be going to therapy.” Absolutely true—in real life. It’s not even an outrageously romantic ending. It’s incorporating some of the issues, but decides to celebrate family, closeness, intimacy, and just going for it, going for broke—in a way that is ok to be explored through art and should not necessarily be explored in your own life.
I loved that The New Yorker writer Inkoo Kang, who might be the most prestigious writer of television in the world, concluded her review of Too Much with “watching feels a lot like falling in love”. I think that’s the greatest endorsement a romantic story could receive.
I cannot thank Janet enough for taking the time to discuss Austen, Substack and her new book with me. Our conversation was an absolute treat.
As is her book, Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist. The vignette structure works really well with The Austen Connection style Janet’s Substack readers know and love. The overarching thread of Austen’s story is cleverly woven through the mini deep-dives into aspects of her life, her work and the social history, with plenty of references to film and TV adaptations, and Austen-related fiction. Basically, my dream read!
Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist is out now. You can find it wherever you usually buy your books (I’ve used an affiliate link to the brilliant Bookshop.org here).
If you would like to receive Janet’s weekly essays do subscribe to The Austen Connection. And if you’d like to join us for the final leg of the Great Austen Readalong, it’s not too late! Our read of Persuasion begins next week—the perfect time to dive in.
Wishing you a lovely weekend and thank you, as ever, for reading.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter you can support my writing in a number of ways—like, comment, share, consider upgrading your subscription or ‘buy me a coffee’. Thank you!
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Really loved this conversation, Claire! You have reminded me that I must rewatch Emma (2020) because I somehow forgot that Josh O'Connor is in it?!
Really enjoyed this conversation and how a passion project turned into a bigger opportunity for Janet. The book looks lovely!
This year I've read my second Jane Austen novel, Northanger Abbey, which I devoured in about two days. With the excitment that ensued, I promised myself I'd read all her books before the end of the year to mark the 250th anniversary of her birth. I doubt I'll manage, but the enthusiam you both show about Austen (and all the extra bits on adaptations!) has reminded me of how much I have enjoyed reading her and I must try and read at least another of her novels by the end of the year.