Let’s be honest: We have a problem in JAFF.
For a long time, I’ve been uncomfortable with the makeup of JAFF (Jane Austen fan fiction). In the indie JAFF space, there are very few authors of colour, and we don’t see many characters of colour in Regency variations in particular, nor do we see a ton of diversity in other respects (sexual orientation, gender, religion, ability, etc.). Overall, indie JAFF is overwhelmingly white, cishet (a person who identifies as the gender they were born as and as heterosexual), Christian, and abled.*
Yes, this is the way Austen wrote the majority of her characters. But this doesn’t mean that JAFF has to keep writing them this way.
*This post is primarily aimed at white JAFF writers and readers, particularly in the published indie space. I will mostly be focusing here on race as something that JAFF writers need to consider in their Regency stories, but sexual orientation, gender, religion, and ability are just as important, as are the intersections of these various qualities, e.g. female POCs, disabled POCs, etc. Also, note that Black and POC (person of colour) aren’t interchangeable terms; POC is a term that encompasses all people of colour, not just Black people.
Why does diversity in JAFF matter?
JAFF is a genre that generally tends to strive for historical accuracy. Have you obsessed about historical accuracy in words and diction, in fashion, in style and décor, in the minutest details of Regency life and customs? Then you should also be paying attention to historical accuracy around the varied lived experiences of people who we don’t often see on the pages of Regency romance, i.e. people who aren’t white and straight.
Both writers and readers of JAFF need to look beyond knowledge gleaned from the fabricated Regency chronotope of novels and period drama and educate themselves on the actual history of marginalized people in the Regency. The recent drama around the petition for a second series of Sanditon demonstrates that Austen fans can be oblivious (and/or willfully ignorant) about the impact of problematic historical aspects, like how the pineapple as represented in Sanditon is actually a symbol of racism and colonialism, not a fun emoji that represents unity in the fandom.
And speaking of Sanditon, Austen’s unfinished novel in which she introduced Miss Lambe, a biracial heiress from the West Indies: if Austen can include a character of colour in 1816, you can do it in 2020.
Objections
I know there are going to be some authors and readers who will balk at or question the reasons for incorporating POCs or queer people or anything outside of the so-called “norm” in JAFF into their stories. Let me try to address some of these arguments:
1) I want to include diversity in my stories, but I’m afraid I’m going to do it wrong
This is a huge first step in recognizing that the need for diversity in JAFF stories is important! Awesome! You don’t stop here, though. The fear of doing it wrong and offending people is not a reason not to do it at all, and truly, mistakes are inevitable.
So what happens if you do make a mistake? The other day, I was watching a discussion about how to make organizations more inclusive spaces, internally and externally. One of the speakers, Ericka Hines, is a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) expert, and she said something that I LOVED about this very issue of being afraid to do it wrong: “Be humble and ready to fumble.” If you mess up, acknowledge it, apologize for it, learn from it, and do better the next time.
But you have to start trying and start putting in the work. Do your research, start small with your diversity efforts, and hire sensitivity readers when needed (more on all of these below), and learn all you can so that you can avoid mistakes as much as possible.
2) Diversity is trendy right now, and I don’t want to include it just for the sake of including it
Black people and people of colour and marginalized people aren’t a trend; these are people and experiences who have been erased from our history because of racism and discrimination and the general centering of white cishet voices. It’s time to put their voices back in.
3) I just can’t connect with characters whose experience I don’t share
I have never been a rich 19th-century white man who runs an estate and cares for a younger sister, yet somehow I can relate to Darcy. Why? Because he’s a character with thoughts and feelings and actions I can empathize with. If you’ve ever read stories where Darcy and Elizabeth are supernatural creatures of some sort and didn’t have a problem with that, how is it a stretch to relate to people who have a different skin colour? All you need is basic empathy.
4) I’m here to entertain, not to push politics on people
You might not care about politics, but the fact is that all art is political—and fanfic is art.
No one is saying you have to overtly announce your politics in your writing—but know that a lack of diversity in your stories is an absence that alerts savvy readers about your politics and how you see the world.
Even if you aren’t consciously doing so, you’re presenting a worldview in your writing that is informed by your position in the world that comes from what you read, what you believe in, and what you understand as truth to you. For example, each of these endings (dependent on context) would likely indicate something different about the writer’s politics:
Darcy kills a truly evil Wickham
Wickham dies by a random runaway carriage
Wickham simply stays out of trouble post-P&P and lives a middling, unexciting life in a market town somewhere
Darcy forgives a genuinely repentant Wickham
The choices that you make for your characters in how they act (and in how you expect readers to interpret those actions) are saying something about how you think people should react to a similar situation. So be careful when you make these choices about what you’re really intending to get across.
5) Regency is my escape from the real world
Why does your escape require the erasure of people of colour or people who are different from you? Let’s be aware of how much we romanticize the Regency—it’s not the time of civility and manners and pretty dresses that we see in period drama, but a time of war and social change and imperialism (where’d your fortune come from, Captain Wentworth?). We’re willing to overlook a lot of things to enjoy our escape. But marginalized people shouldn’t be one of those things.
Again, if historical accuracy is something JAFF cares about, including people who weren’t all white and cishet is an imperative. And if putting POCs or queer people into your stories and simply acknowledging that they existed in Regency England is really going to be an issue to you or your readers, you need to interrogate why that is.
So are you feeling defensive? Feeling called out? Feeling uncomfortable? Good. We are all complicit in this in not having these conversations very often in JAFF. (I include myself in this too, don’t worry.) But this is exactly why we have to have them, so we can get past these feelings and start doing the work to be more thoughtful and inclusive in how we write and read these stories.
What happens if JAFF doesn’t start doing this work?
Photo by Dexter Fernandes on Unsplash
One of the things that I’ve always loved about the JAFF fandom is how tight-knit it is and how we’re united by our shared love for Austen and her characters. But the flipside of that is that it can be difficult for people to find their people and their place in JAFF.
JAFF should be a progressive place where all readers and writers feel welcome. If we don’t start doing the work of making JAFF more inclusive, potential readers and writers are going to feel alienated and simply won’t engage in JAFF, which diminishes the community. If JAFF wants to expand its reach and its readership, it has to put the work in to show that this community is a place where they can belong. There are tons of people of colour who love Austen and who read JAFF and never get to see themselves on the pages of these stories, and there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t.
I’ve talked with people who are deeply frustrated with the current state of JAFF and its pervasive whiteness and cishet centering and who are considering leaving the genre entirely. So the consequence of not being a more welcoming place is not just losing potential sales, it’s losing the fandom itself. This is a fandom with a long, long history and a long institutional memory—let’s keep it going and be better for the future.
Okay, so how does JAFF move towards becoming a more inclusive genre?
Now here comes the hard work. I want to give some actionable steps that you can take to move forward and include more diversity in your JAFF stories:
1) Do the research
JAFF writers are pros at research, so you’ve got this already. The history we’ve been presented in history classes, in books, and in period drama has mostly been written by white people who have their own viewpoint and their own agendas to push. So look for academic works that challenge those old-white-man perspectives and present history in fresh ways. In particular, look for research done by academics of colour and from an non-European perspective. How did the East India Company and colonialism affect the people of India? Find out how Indian people actually reacted in the historical moment rather than how the British perceived their reaction.
Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is a really fascinating book on Black people living in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s an older text (from 1995), but I recommend it as a starting point if you’re looking for a good primer on the roles that Black people played before and during the Regency, and it’s free to download.
The Tumblr Writing With Color also has a fantastic reference section that links to a bunch of different resources to help encourage diversity in fiction.
2) Watch how historical romance is doing it
Historical romance is a few years ahead of JAFF in terms of its steps towards inclusivity—by no means have they mastered it yet (not even close), but JAFF can take a cue from them. For example, Tessa Dare included a very dry, deadpan Indian butler in The Duchess Deal—he doesn’t have a huge role, but he’s an important part of the household and a confidant to both the hero and heroine. This is just a small way in which writers can include more diversity in their stories, but it’s a positive step forward. Vanessa Riley is a historical romance author who gives Black heroines in the Regency their HEAs and explores what it meant to be Black and female during this time. She’s previously talked about the challenges of separating the good and bad takes on race in her Regency research and about wading through history to find the stories that have been overlooked.
In period drama, we’re seeing more diverse or colourblind casting—think Hamilton, the upcoming Mr. Malcolm’s List, Dev Patel in David Copperfield, or the Bridgerton Netflix series. As this article makes clear, colourblind casting in historicals challenges people to rethink their ideas of what history actually looked like and shift their perspectives, and from here, writers can reimagine Austen’s works and how they might include characters from diverse backgrounds in their stories. For example, Catherine Bilson floats the possibility here that Mr. Bingley could be biracial.
But let’s also be aware of when historical romance (or any other genre, for that matter) does a bad job of representing diversity. Part of this is learning how to be a more critical reader and questioning if the representation works. Has the author done their research? Is it a nuanced take, or is it falling into a stereotype? Not being able to conceive of a happy ending for a gay person in a restrictive culture/time or for a person of colour in a predominant white society has led to many authors simply killing off those characters—but of course happiness is possible for them, even within these contexts. Learn to recognize these moments where diversity isn’t being done well, and strive to do better in your own work.
3) Include marginalized people in your story
To start, recognize that there were people of colour or queer people or disabled people in Regency England. You don’t have to have a Black POV character (and you probably shouldn’t if you’re a white person—here’s Crystal Clarke, who played Miss Lambe on Sanditon, explaining why the lack of Black voices in the writers’ room diminished the authenticity of her character; here’s romance author Jackie Lau on white people writing biracial characters and the common mistakes they make), but it’s important to acknowledge that the presence of POCs and marginalized groups in the fabric of Regency society and in your stories.
Don’t make them token characters who conform to stereotypes—not all Black people were formerly enslaved or were servants. And don’t include POCs just because you think you “should” include them; they should have a purpose in the story, so consider if there is a place for them. Not every historical romance novel includes marginalized people, but if your story takes place in cosmopolitan London, it would not be at all out of the ordinary to see people of various races. Similarly, say your characters are in Portsmouth, a busy port town that has ships coming in from all around the world—should you see non-white faces? Probably.
Including characters of different races doesn’t mean you have to solve racism or even make race an issue in your story. Right now, let’s start by showing that POCs, queer people, disabled people, and people of different religions were present in Regency England, especially because we don’t see them often enough in our history books, novels, or period drama. JAFF is at the very first step on a long road here, and it has a lot more work to do beyond this—but this is the starting point.
4) Start thinking more broadly
Once JAFF writers and readers move past simply acknowledging that there’s more than white cishet people in Britain, they can start thinking more broadly about larger issues. Are the Darcys drinking their tea with sugar at Pemberley? How aware and involved are characters in the pressing issues of the time: abolition, industrialization, poverty, etc., and how does that awareness inform who they are and what they do in your story? How do writers deal with intersecting identities and represent them well?
Note that Austen herself was politically engaged in subtle ways in her novels—there’s the aforementioned Miss Lambe in Sanditon, or think about Fanny Price raising the issue of slavery with Sir Thomas (albeit meekly) in Mansfield Park. But as people living in the twenty-first century, JAFF authors have a lot more freedom than Austen did to explore these issues because these aren’t—or shouldn’t be—taboo topics in the modern world.
5) Include diversity in moderns
While there are a number of modern adaptations featuring POCs as the main characters and written by POCs, these are mostly traditionally published books, and there aren’t a ton in the indie JAFF space. (Some indie examples: Nikki Payne’s Netherfield Must Go!, dealing with gentrification in a D.C. neighbourhood; Ikhlas Hussain’s Aisha, an Emma/P&P mashup about a Pakistani-Canadian matchmaker.) I haven’t touched much on modern JAFFs here, mostly because JAFF is so overwhelmingly focused on Regency stories, but there is absolutely no excuse for moderns to not be inclusive. There’s no baby steps here—we live in a multicultural, globalized world, and that should be reflected in our stories.
6) Hire sensitivity readers
If you include marginalized people in your stories, great! If you’re unsure if you’ve done it in a way that won’t misrepresent or offend a reader from that marginalized group, then hire a sensitivity reader. A sensitivity reader is a person who identifies as being from a particular marginalized group (or from intersecting groups) and will read your story and provide objective insight into what you’ve done well and what you need to change to best represent their culture accurately. It’s not enough to ask a friend who belongs to that group to read it for you; you need someone who will be honest with you if you’ve messed up and won’t fear hurting your feelings. It’s worth putting money towards a sensitivity reader and preventing unintentional hurt to people who belong to that group and avoiding backlash towards yourself.
7) Read, listen to, and amplify marginalized voices
It’s a good thing for white writers to write more characters from varied experiences in JAFF, but it’s also important that JAFF writers from marginalized backgrounds have their voices heard and that JAFF is a welcoming space where they can do so. So read and review and talk about their books, and listen to them and support them when they point out problems in the fandom or in representations in JAFF books. Advocate for better practices and transparency in the ways JAFF community spaces are run so that racist actions have consequences and these spaces are safe places for POC. These actions—and not just white authors being more aware of diversity in their books—are what will make the JAFF community truly more inclusive.
Listen, this is not easy work. It’s going to take a lot of being uncomfortable and challenging worldviews and privileges and prejudices, but it’s important. I’m committing to asking my editing clients if they’ve considered including people of colour or queer people or disabled people in their stories if they’re not already there. It’s not a fun conversation to have—I get that no one likes to be put into that defensive position, and it’s uncomfortable for me to ask—but it’s a necessary one.
I’ve also created a list for inclusive JAFF (Regency or any other era) on GoodReads that anyone can add to. If you’ve written one or read one that you think does diversity (in terms of race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, ability) well, contribute to this list. If you're a JAFF author who identifies as part of a marginalized group(s), please include your works as well.
What can you commit to doing? If you’re a JAFF reader, you can commit to reading JAFF that includes marginalized people and reading JAFF by authors from marginalized groups. If you’re a white JAFF writer, you can commit to including more diversity in your stories and doing the necessary work in order to do it well.
The other thing that we can all commit to is calling out problematic representations in JAFF stories. I know this is a fandom that traditionally hasn’t fostered a culture of criticism (and that’s a WHOLE other post), but we can’t let problematic or harmful representations slide. If you see it, say it. Again, I know it’s awkward and uncomfortable and there isn’t really an easy way to broach this topic, but let the writer know so they can learn and fix it.
I love JAFF very much; it has brought me joy and comfort and knowledge and dear friends. But as a genre, JAFF can do better, and JAFF should do better.
ETA: After feedback from the community, I’ve edited this post to add in that this piece is primarily directed at white writers and readers of published JAFF, and to add in #7 to the list of things to do to make JAFF more inclusive, which I shamefully did not include before. I thank the people who pointed out my white-centering of these issues, and I deeply apologize to anyone who was hurt or triggered by these omissions. I welcome your thoughts and feedback on this piece in the comments below or via email.