Hear ye, hear ye

On Tuesday, as you may have heard, we celebrated Jane Austen’s 250^th birthday. Some of us, however, celebrated more officially than others: The governors of at least three U.S. states apparently signed proclamations declaring December 16, 2025, to be “Jane Austen Day.”

I say “apparently” signed because, although these declarations—from the states of Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas—were mentioned in various spots online, I haven’t been able to locate the proclamations on those states’ websites. It’s pretty clear that these official-looking documents, with their fancy seals and gubernatorial signatures, are more gussied-up greeting cards than genuine executive-branch initiatives.

Yet even these anodyne bits of constituent service, it turns out, provide further evidence that Jane Austen means different things to different people.

Presumably, the Jane Austen Society of North America was just looking for some free publicity when it urged its regional coordinators to seek “Jane Austen Day” proclamations from their states and cities. (I heard about this request via a recent post to the Janeites listserv from Arnie Perlstein, assistant treasurer of JASNA’s Oregon & SW Washington Region—and one of the people I profiled in my book Among the Janeites.)

Perlstein reached out to the office of Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, who duly issued a proclamation praising Austen for her “lasting contributions to literature, culture, and feminist thought.” A comment on the Facebook page of JASNA’s Vancouver (Canada) region references a Jane Austen Day proclamation in Massachusetts, as well, although I’ve found no other trace of it.

Which brings us to Texas. Its Jane Austen Day proclamation–which can be seen on the Instagram feed of JASNA’s South Central Texas region, as well as on that JASNA-Vancouver Facebook post–gets off to a problematic start, declaring that “for more than 250 years, Jane Austen’s literary works have captivated readers across the globe.” A neat trick, given that the first of those captivating literary works was published only 214 years ago.

Then Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott, or perhaps his autopen, goes on to applaud Austen’s novels for upholding the values of “virtue, humility, and discernment.” Not to mention “humor, honesty, and heart.” And also “integrity, respect, and moral courage.”

No feminism, though. That’s the blue-state Jane Austen.