Everyone's a fan

Discovering a fellow Janeite can be a bittersweet experience. Sometimes it’s the delightful reassurance that you’re not alone in your enthusiasms. And sometimes it’s the problematic revelation that your tastes match those of an orangutan.

Such is the experience of reading the “Unexpectedly Austen” feature that the Jane Austen Society of North America launched this year to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. Each month, the column’s curators, former JASNA president Liz Philosophos Cooper and Austen scholar Sarah Emsley, dish up Austen-appreciating quotes—some newly solicited, some previously published--from writers, scholars, or celebrities of various kinds.

So far, nearly half those quoted have been novelists, ranging from the eminent (Ian McEwan) to the frothy (Kevin Kwan). Joining the writers have been pop icon Taylor Swift, who watched the Ang Lee adaptation of Sense and Sensibility repeatedly while planning her 2020 album Evermore; actor Adjoa Andoh, of Bridgerton fame, who sees the witty, acerbic Austen narrator as "scotch bonnet to the vanilla dramatizations commonly paraded as examples of her craft and genius"; and former basketball star Dwyane Wade, who calls Pride and Prejudice “one of my favorite books."

Also Albert the orangutan, who lives in the Gdansk Zoo in Poland.

Back in 2012, Albert’s alleged love of Austen—his zookeeper, Michael Krause, claimed to read Albert to sleep at night with fifty pages of Pride and Prejudice—made it into the British tabloids. Albert, then forty years old, was said to enjoy Dickens as well, while his female partner, Raya, preferred German fiction. (In case you were wondering, captive orangutans can live into their late fifties, and judging from these videos, Albert and Raya were still alive at least as recently as 2020-1.)

Obviously, every detail of the story of Alfred’s Austen fandom is suspect, but it’s so adorable that no one cares. (C'mon. How cute were those videos, am I right?) And even if, as seems likely, Albert was hearing Pride and Prejudice in Polish translation, at least he was consuming the book. That puts him one up on Taylor Swift, who made it into “Unexpectedly Austen” on the strength of movie fandom alone.