Camp Austen Quotes

“I have been told that there is no such thing as a half-Janeite, just as there’s no such thing as a half-scholar. Yet in the end, I turned out to be both.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“They come to laugh and to learn, to dance and to listen, to admire and to be admired, to teach and to be taught, to question their assumptions about Jane and to confirm them.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“Austen is able to kick scholars out of their armchairs and into action.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“Janeism is a religion only in these two respects - reverence for the God head and adherence to the text.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“Part of being a fan means recognizing that Austen belongs equally to all of us even as we feel viscerally that everyone else has got her utterly wrong. Like all fans we are by necessity irrational creatures.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“There is something unbearably selfish about the two person romance - about Romeo and Juliet or Heathcliff and Catherine. Austen’s novels do not belong to this species of love story. They are ensemble affairs not duos against the world. And they’re far more concerned with the question of how to live among our fellow beings than how to marry your best friend. The books end in weddings but that doesn’t make them love stories - it just makes them comedies.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“Imitation is flattery, and parody is backhanded flattery.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“A love for books and mischief is often born in childhood, and it seems possible that no child in English letters has ever had as much fun pillaging her father's library as the young Jane Austen.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“(He also expressed gentle alarm over the suspected presence of “crypto-Trollopians” in the audience, a joke that landed with surprising force.)”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan