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The article is titled “Jane Austen at 250: Why we shouldn’t exaggerate her radicalism.” It was originally published on August 7, 2025 and is authored by Kerry Sinanan, Associate Professor of Global pre-1800 Literature, University of Winnipeg.

The BBC’s recent docuseries, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, the PBS mini-series Miss Austen as well as cultural and tourism festivities are all marking the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth for a global audience.
Scholars have long noted Austen’s significant innovations with the novel form and enduring popularity.
Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius follows the 2023 BBC series Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius. Through the show’s titling and packaging, and by combining scholarly with popular commentary, the series promotes Austen as an authorial standard of modern literature.
It also sometimes presents her as socially subversive and a breaker of barriers, amplifying arguments that she was a “radical.”
The meaning of the word radical is to uproot and dismantle fundamental structures. Austen’s novels, skilful and absorbing as they are, offer no social or political revolutions: rather, they reform and realign Regency Britain, using the romance plot and its Cinderella template.
From my perspective as a professor of global pre-1800 literature who has studied narratives around the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, what the series perhaps overlooks is that, in today’s context of Brexit, the politics of canon and tradition affirm a nationalist and neoimperial culture.
This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.
Framing of slavery and empire
The series presents the 18th century as “booming” from the wealth of trade. While slavery and empire are mentioned in the first episode, the narration states slavery was being challenged by “progress and equality.”
Characterizing the Regency as a time for emerging progressive politics repeats colonial discourse and racial hierarchies, ignoring the fact that the high point of racism and British global empire in the Victorian era followed its slave-trading years. Enlightenment “progress” and abolitionism led to imperial domination.
As literary and cultural critic Edward Said explained, we should read the formation of the European “canon as a polyphonic accompaniment to the expansion of Europe.”
Said argues “imperialist discourse” in works by Austen and other canonical writers goes hand in hand with colonialism on the ground. Caribbean slavery is the backdrop for Mansfield Park, which sees Sir Thomas Bertram visit his plantations in Antigua to boost his profits.
As the BBC series acknowledges, Austen’s family benefited from slavery, as did many of her contemporaries, in an age when Britain dominated the slave trade.
The 250th birthday celebrations of Austen’s birth need to be read in the context of recreating a white, nationalist culture for a reactionary Brexit Britain, proud of its military Redcoats and imperial past — reflected in celebratory romance, afternoon tea, naval officers, muslin-gown esthetics and cosplay.
Characterization of the British Navy
One contributor to the BBC series is retired Royal Navy admiral Lord Alan William John West, a Labour Peer. He describes the British Navy of the time as “charting the world” and “leading scientific discovery,” uncritically deploying the language of colonial “discovery” and Enlightenment values.
This erases the Asian, African and Indigenous cultures that Britain colonized via trade monopolies, slavery, the East India Company and settler colonialism.
These histories have lasting legacies: West caused a furor in 2020 when he stated that asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats should be put in “a concentrated place, whether it’s a camp or whatever.”
How the British government deploys its navy in the 21st century cannot be separated from ongoing colonial and nationalist actions.
‘Genius’ discourse
Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius touches upon Austen’s narrative innovation and importance (something intimated by literature scholar Paddy Bullard, who states there was writing before Austen and after Austen). Through the “genius” title and some “genius” commentary, the series appears to twin this analysis with the suggestion that Austen was counter-cultural.
Well-known author Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary) describes Austen as a “genius” and the term is used by other writers, too.
The label “genius” perpetuates racist 18th-century Chain of Being discourses that placed white people at the top of a racialized hierarchy of being and Black people at the bottom. In 1774’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, Oliver Goldsmith concluded “man is naturally white.”
“Genius” is an ableist concept based in post-Darwinian eugenics and suggests a connection between supposed intelligence and evolution.
Austen and conservative social roles
One of the most prominent literary critics of Austen, British scholar Marilyn Butler, argued in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas that Austen’s novels confirm conservative roles for women in society, emphasizing “self-abnegation” and duty, and that she refused radical, Jacobin ideas of equality and political revolution.
Indeed, while a multiplicity of perspectives can be read in Austen, the structures of Austen’s plots ultimately affirm a conservative social and political order.
Far from being subversive, Austen, via alluring romance plots, massages her class-structured society into accepting the lower gentry and trading class, such as the Bennets and Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice.
Reading Austen and slavery
As I have argued, Darcy is not only an ideal romantic hero, but an ideal Briton at the heart of empire, ready to anchor the landed ancien régime of England as it moved into the burgeoning era of global domination, with a morality rooted in Protestant supremacy.
In the series, Bullard describes Austen as a “fan” of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and Austen biographer Paula Byrne reads Mansfield Park as a “serious” engagement with the “shadows” of slavery and “women’s suppression.”
Yet, while slavery is alluded to, the novel is not clearly anti-slavery. In Mansfield Park Austen offers a careful satire of an enslaving family, but one that positively secures the Bertrams’ place in society, merely amending their values.
Recent scholarship that uncovered how Austen’s brothers participated in the abolition movement after her death suggests Austen may have been on her way to becoming a public abolitionist.
However, this is speculative: while many women writers such as Hannah More and Anne Yearsley wrote explicitly anti-slavery pieces, Austen was not a public abolitionist.
Slavery suffused Romantic literature. At a time abounding with radical writers and anti-slavery pamphlets, poems and tracts, including those written by formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, the fact that Austen — like her contemporaries — became increasingly aware of the inhumanity of the Middle Passage is not saying much.
Perpetuating myth
Suggesting Mansfield Park deeply treats aspects of slavery or women’s suppression glosses over the legal realities of chattel slavery. Under English colonial law, enslaved women’s children were transformed into legal property.
Women in 18th-century Britain had limited rights, but as Austen’s novels illustrate, they were not legal property. We follow her heroines taking their desired places, including Fanny Price, in securing a culture of white, male inheritance.
Austen was a compelling innovator of the novel form. Presenting her as radical and a genius misunderstands her art and misrepresents the imperial culture that she was part of, instead perpetuating new myths of a British literary canon.

Jane Austen at 250: Why we shouldn’t exaggerate her radicalism

August 7, 2025 • My Project Name

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