Rest in peace, Editrix

I can’t remember when I first read AustenBlog, Maggie Sullivan’s indispensable guide to early-twenty-first-century Jane Austen fandom.

I missed the moment in July of 2004 when Maggie launched her site, planning to provide sober, dispassionate reporting on Austen’s pop-culture presence. And I still hadn’t found AustenBlog on the day, a mere three weeks later, when Maggie tossed the sober-and-dispassionate thing to the winds, the better to wax sarcastic about the costumes in the upcoming film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

However long it took me, by the time I discovered AustenBlog, it had established itself as the go-to site for Austen news, one of the first such places on the still-youngish Internet. And Maggie’s Janeite community service didn’t end there: Not long after, she set up a useful reference site, Molland’s, which hosted searchable texts of Austen’s work and a repository of out-of-copyright illustrations and criticism.

All of that would have been enough to give Maggie exemplary standing in the Janeite community. But throughout its eighteen-year history, AustenBlog was more than useful--it was delightful. And what made it so was Maggie's inimitable voice, a witty, knowing combination of good sense and good snark. Had Jane Austen been reincarnated as a blogger, I often felt, she would have sounded like this.

Maggie called us her “Gentle Readers” and herself “the Editrix,” or sometimes the “tar-hearted uptight spinster purist.” She referred to her apartment in the Philadelphia suburbs as “AustenBlog World Headquarters,” conjuring a devoted retainer named Dorothy—the “ancient housekeeper” invented by Henry Tilney to tease the overimaginative Catherine Morland—who supplied her with soothing cups of rooibos tea. And when she encountered a particularly ill-informed or disrespectful use of Austen, Maggie dispensed snarky justice at the end of a (metaphorical) weapon she named the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness. ("Have we entered Austen Bizarro World or do we just have another ignorant journalist on our hands?" she wrote in one post, headlined "NICE BEER YOU'VE GOT THERE. TOO BAD WE HAD TO SMASH IT WITH THE CLUEBAT.")

I can hardly bear the realization that we’ll never hear that voice again. Maggie died last month, at the untimely age of 63, after a two-year struggle with endometrial cancer.

I interviewed Maggie for my book Among the Janeites—in person, she was funny, kind, fast-talking, and self-deprecating--but I can’t say that I knew her well. We caught up eagerly at Janeite gatherings, followed each other on social media, and exchanged occasional emails. But you didn’t have to know her well to see that Maggie was a person of many enthusiasms, some of them slightly eccentric. (Scandinavian royalty? Go figure.) 

Crochetwork by Maggie Sullivan

Her social media feeds were replete with shoutouts to her beloved Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, pictures of Baby Yoda and sparkly tiaras, and in-progress shots of her impressive crochet and tatting projects. (She gave me the Austen silhouette pictured here during one of our interviews.) She loved the Horatio Hornblower books—twentieth-century novels set during the Napoleonic Wars--and once ran a website dedicated to the actor Adrien Brody. (It was called Brodylicious.)

But Jane Austen was her greatest love, even though by Janeite standards Maggie was relatively old (thirty-ish) when she discovered Our Author. On her first

readings, Maggie told me, she delighted in Austen’s humor, marveled that works with such a fresh, contemporary feel dated back two centuries, and was swept off her feet by the passion of Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne Elliot. Northanger Abbey was Maggie’s favorite among Austen’s novels, and Henry Tilney was her ideal hero—a male version of Elizabeth Bennet, she said.

Maggie’s life wasn’t easy. The youngest of four children from a working-class family, she lost both her parents by the age of eleven. Although the relatives who took her in were far kinder than the denizens of Mansfield Park, she nevertheless identified intensely with the orphaned protagonist of Jane Eyre.

As a child, Maggie loved reading and writing, and at college she studied English and journalism, but financial issues stalled her educational progress; she earned a degree in her mid-thirties, attending night school while holding a series of uninspiring clerical jobs. A largely self-taught techie, she eventually spent many years in far more fulfilling work as web content manager for a well-known Philadelphia law firm.

Leveraging the reputation she built via AustenBlog, the passion project she pursued during nights and weekends, she realized her dream of becoming a published author: The Jane Austen Handbook, a guide to Regency customs and manners, and Jane Austen Cover to Cover, an entertaining history of Austen book covers, were published by Quirk Books, the small publishing house that later had a monster hit with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Maggie also published There Must Be Murder, a Northanger Abbey sequel, and contributed a touching, Persuasion-inspired short story to the fanfic collection Jane Austen Made Me Do It and another to Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine. Working on Austen fanfic was her version of graduate school in creative writing, she told me.

My favorite of Maggie's fictions may be her 2010 blog series “The League of Austen’s Extraordinary Gentlemen,” a seven-part drama in which characters from all Austen’s books band together to fight off the vampires, sea monsters, and, yes, zombies threatening to overwhelm the original novels. (Warning: Do not read while drinking coffee, since you’re going to laugh so hard you may spit it across your screen.)

It's crushing to think that a Janeite as devoted as Maggie won't be in Baltimore next month, when the members of the Jane Austen Society of North America gather to toast the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth. Maggie loved those JASNA conferences. But somehow it also seems poetic that she should leave this world during a moment when her beloved author's star is ascendant.

Death is famously kept offstage in Jane Austen’s novels, so I hope Maggie—now wielding her Cluebat from on high--will forgive me for closing with an epitaph from the work of a different author.

“She was in a class by herself,” E.B. White writes at the end of Charlotte’s Web. “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." Charlotte, he concludes, "was both.” So was Maggie Sullivan.