A festival reborn

Back in 2008, the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Louisville chapter launched a Jane Austen Festival, held over a July weekend at the eighteenth-century Locust Grove plantation. Over the next thirteen years, as it grew into a big, beloved annual event, the festival leaned into the historical re-enactment side of Austen fandom—more dancing, dueling, food, and fashion than academic-minded literary criticism.

But then the music stopped: After a virtual festival in the COVID year of 2020 and a hybrid event the following summer, Locust Grove announced in January 2022 that it was canceling the whole thing, and for the next three years, no festival was held.

What happened? Accounts differ. A local alternative weekly reported that “a racial reckoning” had killed the festival—that Louisville Janeites were resisting Locust Grove’s decision to highlight the site’s historic entanglement with slavery.

Locust Grove posted a Facebook message citing both logistical and ethical reasons for its decision: Its small staff couldn’t handle the organizing alone, Austen fans weren’t volunteering as enthusiastically as they once had, and “as a site of enslavement we must reconsider the compatibility of this kind of imaginative and celebratory event with the core mission of our organization and the history of this site.”

Meanwhile, in comments on another Facebook post a few months later, a local JASNA leader insisted volunteers were just burned out with the festival workload. “There is no ‘racial reckoning,’ ” she wrote. “In the history of Louisville's group, we are not aware of any racist comments or behavior, nor would we *ever* tolerate racism!”

I haven’t done my own reporting on this issue, so I’m not qualified to adjudicate these different points of view. But I can pass on some good news: The Jane Austen Festival is coming back this summer, albeit in a different venue. This year’s festival will be held June 28-29 at Heritage Village Museum in Sharonville, Ohio, near Cincinnati.

The schedule includes presentations on the music, dance, fashion, and crafts of Austen’s time, as well as an array of vendors selling books, clothing, food, and accessories. Entrance tickets cost from $20 to $50.

Unlike Locust Grove, which was built with the labor of enslaved people and functioned as a slave plantation for much of its early history, Heritage Village is a less problematic site—a living history museum composed mostly of authentic buildings relocated from other places in Ohio and Kentucky. Here’s hoping the venue change gives the much-loved Jane Austen Festival a new lease on life.